A House of Prayer for All Peoples
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Isaiah 56–59 (with Mark 11:15–17; Ephesians 2:11–18)
Before this session, read Isaiah 56 through 59. Notice the house of prayer thrown open to the foreigner and the outcast (56:3–8); the high and holy One who dwells with the crushed and lowly in spirit (57:15); the fast God actually wants: to remove the sinful chains and feed the hungry (58:6–7); the sins that separate us from God (59:1–2); and the Redeemer who comes when God sees that there is no one to save (59:16–20).
I will bring them to my holy mountain; I will make them happy in the temple where people pray to me … for my temple will be known as a temple where all nations may pray.
Isaiah 56:7
A House of Prayer for All Peoples
After the great invitation of chapter 55, the prophet immediately shows us just how wide that invitation reaches: wider, perhaps, than its first hearers were entirely comfortable with. He turns to two kinds of people the old law had kept at arm’s length from the worshipping assembly: the foreigner and the eunuch. No foreigner who becomes a follower of the LORD should say, “The LORD will certainly exclude me from his people.” The eunuch should not say, “Look, I am like a dried-up tree” (56:3). Both had reason to feel shut out: the foreigner because he was not of Israel, the eunuch because the law barred him from the congregation (Deuteronomy 23:1), and because, unable to have children, he felt himself a “dried-up tree,” a dead end, a man with no future and no name to carry on after him.
And to both of them, God speaks an astonishing welcome. To the eunuchs who are faithful to His covenant He promises a monument that will be better than sons and daughters … a permanent monument for them that will remain (56:5). The Hebrew calls it, literally, “a hand and a name.” The man who thought himself a dried-up tree, with no children to carry his name into the future, is given by God a memorial better than any children could ever have given him: a name that will remain. And the foreigners who become followers of the Lord, God says, I will bring them to my holy mountain; I will make them happy in the temple where people pray to me … for my temple will be known as a temple where all nations may pray (56:6–7). The house of God is not a private club for the insider, the native-born, the respectable. It is a house of prayer for all peoples: for the outsider, the foreigner, the excluded, the dried-up tree.
There is a tender word here for more people than we might at first think. The eunuch’s particular grief was that he would leave nothing behind him: no children, no name carried on, no mark upon the world that would outlast his own short life. He felt himself a dried-up tree, a dead end. And there are many who carry some version of that same grief: those who have no children, or who have lost them; those who feel their lives have amounted to little the world will trouble to remember; those who quietly fear they will pass out of memory the moment they are gone. To every such heart God says exactly what He said to the eunuch: that He will give a monument that will be better than sons and daughters, a permanent memorial, a name that will remain. The legacy we could never secure for ourselves, God secures Himself: a name written by His own hand in the book of life, a name that remains, kept safe with Him. No one who belongs to God is a dried-up tree; and no one who belongs to God is, in the end, forgotten.
The Lord Jesus took these words up with some heat. When He came into the temple and found the court of the Gentiles (the one place where foreigners were permitted to come and pray) turned into a noisy marketplace of money changers and sellers, He overturned their tables and drove them out, quoting this very verse: Is it not written: “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations”? (Mark 11:17). The outrage was not merely the commerce; it was that they had crowded the nations out of the only space the nations had, turning the house of prayer for all peoples into a market for the few. The Lord Jesus cleared it because God’s house was meant to stand open to exactly the people they had shut out.
And we have, in the book of Acts, a living picture of this promise come true. An Ethiopian official, a foreigner from the ends of the earth, and a eunuch (a “dried-up tree” by the old reckoning), sat in his chariot reading the scroll of Isaiah, and Philip ran to him, and beginning at the very passage we studied in the session on Isaiah 53:7–12, preached to him the Lord Jesus; and the man believed, and was baptized then and there, and went on his way rejoicing. A foreigner and a eunuch, exactly the two figures of Isaiah 56, was among the very first of the Gentiles to be brought into the house of prayer, given a place and a name better than sons and daughters. The promise was no mere figure of speech. God meant it, down to the dried-up tree.
I Dwell with the Contrite
In the next chapter, after a long and painful catalog of the people’s idolatry, God says something that stands out from its surroundings like a jewel set in dark cloth. For this is what the high and exalted one says, the one who rules forever, whose name is holy: “I dwell in an exalted and holy place, but also with the discouraged and humiliated, in order to cheer up the humiliated and to encourage the discouraged” (57:15). Read it slowly, for it tells us where God lives. He is “the high and exalted one … the one who rules forever, whose name is holy” (the Hebrew says, “who inhabits eternity”): the transcendent God, above all, beyond all, infinitely exalted. And He says He keeps two dwellings.
The first we might have guessed: “I dwell in an exalted and holy place.” Of course He does; the high and holy God dwells in the high and holy place. But the second address is the wonder of it: “but also with the discouraged and humiliated.” The God who inhabits eternity also lives in the broken heart. He has two homes: the high and holy place, and the crushed spirit; the throne of heaven, and the humbled soul. And these are not, as we might expect, opposites that God merely tolerates; they are the two places this God most loves to be. The same God whose majesty fills the heavens stoops to make His home in the one thing the world counts worthless: a broken and a humble heart.
It is worth being clear about what such a spirit actually is, since the words can be badly misheard. The word the NET renders “discouraged” means, at root, “crushed,” a close cousin of the word behind the psalmist’s “humble and repentant heart” (Psalm 51:17); it is the old word contrite. To be contrite is not to grovel, not to wallow in self-hatred, not to keep telling oneself over and over how worthless one is; that is only its own kind of pride turned inside out, a preoccupation with self by another name. A contrite spirit is simply an honest one: a heart that has stopped pretending, that has given up the long and exhausting project of justifying itself, that says plainly before God, I have sinned, I cannot save myself, I need mercy. It is the heart of the psalmist who prayed, O God, a humble and repentant heart you will not reject (Psalm 51:17). There is a great relief in coming at last to that place: the relief of no longer having to keep up the performance. And it is exactly there, where the pretending stops and the truth is finally told, that God draws near. He cannot dwell in a heart still busy defending itself; there is no room in it for Him. He dwells where the defenses have come down.
And notice carefully whom He does not say He dwells with. Not the proud. Not the strong, the self-sufficient, the impressive, the religiously accomplished. The God of all majesty does not make His home in the heart that is full of itself; He makes it in the heart that is empty, broken, contrite: the heart that knows its own need and has stopped pretending otherwise. This is the consistent way of God, the very pattern of the cross: He opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble; He fills the hungry with good things, and the rich He sends empty away. If you would have God draw near, the way is not up but down: not to make yourself more impressive, but to become honest about being broken. The contrite heart is not the disqualification we so often fear it to be. It is the very address where God has promised to live.
And why does He come to the contrite? The verse itself tells us: “in order to cheer up the humiliated and to encourage the discouraged.” The Hebrew verb is stronger still: to revive, to make alive again. He does not come to the broken in order to break them further, nor to the humbled to grind them down lower still. He comes to revive them: to breathe life back into the crushed spirit, to lift the bowed-down head, to mend the broken heart. The God who dwells with the contrite is a reviving God, a God who comes to the very end of us in order to make a new beginning there. So the broken heart, far from being the place God avoids, is the place God runs to; and the work He does there is not destruction but resurrection. If your spirit is crushed tonight, you are not far from God. You are, by His own word, exactly where He has promised to be.
Peace to the Far and the Near
The same passage goes on to show us a God whose anger at sin is real, but never the last word. For I will not be hostile forever or perpetually angry, for then man’s spirit would grow faint before me, the life-giving breath I created (57:16). God knows our frame; He knows that if His wrath ran on forever, the very spirit He made would simply fail, be crushed clean out of existence. So His anger, real as it is, is tempered by mercy; He will not be hostile forever. And though He had every reason to leave a wayward people to themselves, He says instead: I have seen their behavior, but I will heal them. I will lead them, and I will provide comfort to them and those who mourn with them (57:18). He has seen our ways, all of them, the worst of them; and His settled response is not finally to condemn, but to heal.
Linger a moment on that, for it is far more than we would ever dare to expect. I have seen their behavior: God has watched the whole sorry record, the idolatry and the wandering and the rebellion catalogued in the verses just before; nothing whatever is hidden from Him, no excuse is needed because no fact is missing. And having seen the whole of it: I will heal them. We might have braced ourselves for “I have seen their behavior, and I will judge them,” and it would have been perfectly just. Instead the verb is heal. God looks at the sinner the way a physician looks at a patient, and not the way a prosecutor looks at a defendant: His full knowledge of our disease is precisely what moves Him to cure it. This is worth holding onto with both hands, because we so often imagine that if God really saw us (all of us, the parts we keep hidden), He would turn away in disgust. But He has already seen us, all the way down to the bottom. And His response to what He sees there is to heal.
And then comes a word of peace that reaches in two directions at once. “Peace, peace, to the far and to the near,” says the LORD, “and I will heal him” (Isaiah 57:19, ESV). Peace to the near: to those who were close, the people of Israel; and peace to the far: to those at a great distance, the outsiders, the Gentiles. Paul saw in these words the whole reconciling work of the Lord Jesus. Writing to Gentile believers, he said that the Lord Jesus came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near (Ephesians 2:17): that in His cross He made peace, destroyed the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile, and created one new man out of the two. The peace announced here, to the far and the near alike, is the peace He made by His own blood, gathering near and far into a single household.
We do not always notice that the peace of the cross runs in two directions, and not only one. We rightly cherish the peace it makes between us and God; that is the very heart of it. But Paul insists that it makes peace between us and one another as well. The dividing wall that the cross broke down was not only the wall between the sinner and God; it was the wall between Jew and Gentile, between peoples who had despised and feared each other for centuries. In the Lord Jesus they became one: one new man, one household, one family gathered at one table. And this is no small part of the gospel’s work in the world. Wherever the cross is truly received, old enmities begin to lose their grip; people who would never otherwise have sat down together find themselves brothers and sisters. A church divided along the very lines the world draws (of class, of race, of nation) has not yet let the peace of the cross do its full work in it. The Redeemer made peace with God and peace among His people in one and the same act.
But the chapter ends on a sober contrast, lest we imagine that peace is automatic, simply owed to everyone regardless. But the wicked are like a surging sea that is unable to be quiet; its waves toss up mud and sand (57:20). And the verdict follows: “There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked” (Isaiah 57:21, ESV). The wicked, those who will not turn, who cling stubbornly to their rebellion, have no peace; they are like a restless, churning sea that can never come to rest. There is a peace held out to the far and the near, freely; but it is received by turning, by the contrite heart, not clutched at alongside an unrepentant life. The same God who revives the contrite leaves the proud and the unrepentant to the very restlessness they have chosen for themselves.
The Kind of Fast I Want
Chapter 58 opens with the people puzzled and a little aggrieved. They have been fasting, going through all the motions of religious devotion, and they complain that God does not seem to notice: Why don’t you notice when we fast? Why don’t you pay attention when we humble ourselves? (58:3). And God answers them bluntly. Their fasting is hollow, because at the same time they fast, they satisfy their selfish desires and oppress their workers, and their fasting is accompanied by arguments, brawls, and fistfights (58:4). A fast that bows the head like a reed for a single day, while the heart and the hands go on exactly as before, is not the fast God wants from anyone. Religious performance laid over an unchanged life does not impress Him in the least.
This was a danger the prophets returned to again and again, because it is a danger that never goes out of fashion. There is something in the religious heart that would always rather perform a ritual than love a neighbor: that finds it easier to fast, to attend, to give the outward observance, than to actually deal justly, and show mercy, and walk humbly with God. Ritual is safe; it can be done at arm’s length, on a schedule, without ever touching the hard places of the heart or the inconvenient needs of the people right in front of us. And so we are forever tempted to substitute the one for the other: to be scrupulous about the forms of religion while remaining quietly hard toward the hungry and the wronged. God sees straight through it. He is not against fasting, or against any of the outward forms; He gave many of them Himself. He is against the use of them as a screen, a way of looking devout while the life behind the screen goes on entirely untouched. The form was always meant to serve the love, and never once to replace it.
And then God describes the fast He actually wants, and it has next to nothing to do with going hungry, and everything to do with the neighbor. No, this is the kind of fast I want: I want you to remove the sinful chains, to tear away the ropes of the burdensome yoke, to set free the oppressed … I want you to share your food with the hungry and to provide shelter for homeless, oppressed people. When you see someone naked, clothe them! (58:6–7). The fast God wants is mercy: setting the oppressed free, feeding the hungry, taking the homeless poor into your own house, clothing the naked. Not ritual turned inward upon itself, but love turned outward toward the suffering neighbor.
We must be careful here, for this could be misread as though God were saying we earn His favor by our good deeds, and that would be the opposite of everything else we have heard in this book. The mercy God asks for here is not the root of our standing with Him; it is the fruit of it. A heart that has received the free grace of chapter 55 (that has been welcomed into the house of prayer though it had no money to pay) will not then turn a cold face to the hungry and the naked. The God who fed us when we were starving means to feed others through us; the God who took us in when we were cast out means to make us into people who take others in. True religion is not the ritual that leaves the neighbor unhelped; it is, as James would later say, to care for orphans and widows in their adversity (James 1:27). And the Lord Jesus would one day say that whatever we did, or failed to do, for the hungry and the stranger and the naked, we did to Him. The fast God wants is simply faith with its sleeves rolled up.
Your Sins Have Alienated You
Chapter 59 begins by clearing God of a charge we are quick to lay against Him. When our prayers seem to go unanswered, when God seems distant and silent, we are tempted to conclude that He cannot help us, or will not hear us. The prophet will not allow it. Look, the LORD’s hand is not too weak to deliver you; his ear is not too deaf to hear you (59:1). The problem is not on God’s end. His hand is not too weak to reach us; His ear is not too deaf to hear us. If there is a distance between us and God, that distance was not made by Him.
This is a hard word, but a healthy one, because we are so very practiced at blaming God for a distance of our own making. When prayer feels like talking to the ceiling, when God seems far off and unresponsive, our first instinct is to wonder what is wrong with God: whether He has grown cold, or stopped caring, or was never really there at all. The prophet gently turns us around to look in the mirror. The fault, he says, is not in the God who saves and hears; it is in us, in the sin we have cherished and refused to give up. This does not feel like good news at first hearing; we would almost rather the problem were God’s, since then at least it would be out of our hands. But in fact it is the better news by far. If the distance were God’s doing, we would be helpless before it, with nothing to do but wait and hope He changed His mind. Because it is ours, it can be named, confessed, forsaken, and, as the chapter will very shortly show, torn down by the very God we had been blaming for it.
Where, then, did it come from? But your sinful acts have alienated you from your God; your sins have caused him to reject you and not listen to your prayers (59:2). There is the answer, and it is not a comfortable one. Our sin is what separates us from God: it has built a wall, turned His face from us, broken the connection. Not God’s weakness, but our iniquity. And the chapter goes on to lay out the sad evidence in painful detail: hands stained with blood, lips that speak lies, justice driven back, honesty stumbling in the city square; we grope along the wall like the blind (59:10), the people confess, stumbling at noontime as if it were evening. It is one of the most honest reckonings with sin in all of Scripture, and it ends not in excuse but in confession: our rebellious deeds are many before You, and we know our sins all too well (59:12).
And this honest reckoning leads to a kind of dead end, a place of utter helplessness. The wall is real; the separation is our own doing; and there is, the chapter makes painfully plain, no one among us able to do a thing about it. God looks for someone to stand in the gap, to set things right, to bridge the separation our sin has made, and He finds no one. He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede (Isaiah 59:16, ESV). There was no man equal to the task; no one righteous enough to repair the breach, no intercessor able to stand between a holy God and a guilty people. Left to ourselves, the story would simply end here: at the wall, in the dark, with no one at all to help. But, thank God, it does not end here.
A Redeemer Will Come to Zion
For when God saw that there was no man to save, He did not shrug and turn away. He did the most astonishing thing imaginable. Then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him (Isaiah 59:16, ESV). When there was no man, God Himself stepped in; His own arm (the very arm of the Lord we met back in chapter 53, revealed for all the world to see) brought the salvation that no human hand ever could. If no one could repair the breach, then God would repair it Himself. Salvation, from first to last, would be God’s own work, undertaken for the plain reason that there was no one else in heaven or earth who could do it.
And the prophet paints a startling picture of God arming Himself for the rescue, like a warrior dressing for battle. He put on righteousness as a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head; he put on garments of vengeance for clothing (Isaiah 59:17, ESV). God girds Himself with righteousness and salvation and goes out to war: not against us, but against everything that holds us captive, against the sin and death that built the wall in the first place. Paul would later take this very armor and hand it on to the church (Ephesians 6:14–17): the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, are first God’s own armor, worn in the fight to save us, and only then given to us to wear in the fight to stand. The armor we are told to put on was forged on the day God Himself went out to rescue a people who could not lift a finger to rescue themselves.
And the rescue has a name, and a destination. “And a Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression,” declares the LORD (Isaiah 59:20, ESV). The Redeemer, the kinsman who buys back, the kinsman-redeemer we met earlier in this study, will come. He comes to Zion, to His people; He comes to those who turn from their transgression. And Paul, looking back across the centuries, saw this promise fulfilled and still unfolding in the Lord Jesus: The Deliverer will come out of Zion (Romans 11:26). The Redeemer who comes when no man can save is no mere man at all; He is God’s own arm, God’s own salvation, God Himself come in person to do what no one else could. When there was no intercessor, God provided one: the one Mediator between God and men, the Lord Jesus, who always lives to make intercession. The wall our sin had built, God Himself tore down, from His side, because there was no one on ours who could.
And there is deep comfort in seeing the gospel laid out in just this way, as the rescue God mounted when no one else could be found. It means that our salvation never rested, even for a single moment, on our finding the right man, or mustering the right righteousness, or producing the right intercessor. We could not; there was none. It rested, from before the foundation of the world, on God’s own settled determination to be our Redeemer Himself. And what God undertakes, God finishes. A salvation that depended on us would be lost the very first day; a salvation that depends on God’s own arm cannot fail, because His hand is not too weak, and the salvation it has won stands finished for all. The Redeemer has come to Zion. The wall is down. And He did it Himself.
Gathering the Threads
These four chapters have ranged widely, but they hold together around the surprising movements of God’s grace. We have seen Him throw open the doors of His house wider than anyone expected, to the foreigner and the eunuch, the outsider and the dried-up tree, for His house is a house of prayer for all peoples. We have seen the high and holy God who inhabits eternity make His second home in the broken and contrite heart, coming to the lowly not to crush them but to revive them. We have heard Him speak peace to the far and the near alike, and describe the only fast He truly values: not hollow ritual, but mercy with its sleeves rolled up. We have faced the hard truth that our sins, and not any failure in God, have built the wall between us and Him. And we have watched God, finding no man able to tear that wall down, tear it down Himself, His own arm bringing the salvation no human hand could ever reach.
And that last movement is the whole gospel in miniature. Our entire hope rests not on a man we might somehow find, but on the arm of God that found us. When there was no one (no intercessor, no rescuer, no one righteous enough to stand in the gap), God did not abandon the work; He became, Himself, the Redeemer who came to Zion. So if you are conscious tonight of the wall your own sin has built, and of your complete inability to tear it down, then you are exactly the person these chapters were written for. You do not have to bridge the separation; you could not if you tried. The Redeemer has come to do it: God’s own arm, reaching across from His side to ours. Your part is simply to be one of those who turn from transgression, and to let the Redeemer who came to Zion come, also, to 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.
1. God welcomes the foreigner and the eunuch (the outsider and the “dried-up tree”) into His house, promising a monument better than sons and daughters (56:5–7). Why did the Lord Jesus react so strongly when the temple’s court of the Gentiles was crowded out (Mark 11:17)? Who are the “outsiders” the church today might be tempted to shut out?
2. God says He dwells both in an exalted and holy place and also with the discouraged and humiliated (57:15), the crushed and lowly in spirit. Why does the God of all majesty make His home in the broken heart rather than the proud one? What comfort is there in this for someone whose spirit is crushed tonight?
3. Peace is announced to the far and to the near (Isaiah 57:19, ESV), which Paul applies to the Lord Jesus reconciling Gentile and Jew (Ephesians 2:17). What does it mean that the cross makes peace between people, and not only between us and God?
4. God rejects hollow fasting and wants instead mercy: feeding the hungry, sheltering the poor, clothing the naked (58:6–7). How is this mercy the fruit of grace rather than a way of earning it? How does it connect to what the Lord Jesus said about the hungry and the stranger (Matthew 25:35–40)?
5. God’s hand is not too weak; rather, your sinful acts have alienated you from your God (59:1–2). Why does it matter to locate the problem in our sin rather than in God’s ability or willingness? How does this honest reckoning prepare us for the gospel?
6. Finding no man and no one to intercede, God’s own arm brought him salvation (Isaiah 59:16, ESV), and a Redeemer will come to Zion (Isaiah 59:20, ESV). Why is it such good news that salvation is God’s own work, undertaken because no one else could do it? How does this make our salvation secure?
Looking Ahead
The next session brings us to a passage we have been moving toward for some time, and one of the most famous in all of Isaiah, because of what the Lord Jesus did with it. One Sabbath, in the synagogue of His hometown of Nazareth, He stood up to read, was handed the scroll of Isaiah, and found this place: The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound (Isaiah 61:1, ESV). He read it, rolled up the scroll, sat down, and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read” (Luke 4:21). He claimed it as His very own. Here is the Anointed One (the Messiah, the Christ) describing His own mission in His own words: sent to the poor, the brokenhearted, the captive; to announce the year of the Lord’s favor, to console all who mourn, and to give them a turban instead of ashes, oil symbolizing joy instead of mourning, and a garment symbolizing praise instead of discouragement.
Before the next session, read Isaiah 61:1–3, and Luke 4:16–21, where the Lord Jesus reads these words in the synagogue and claims them as fulfilled in Himself. Hear the Anointed One announce His mission: the Spirit of the Lord God upon Him, sent to bring good news to the poor and to bind up the brokenhearted (61:1); to announce the year of the Lord’s favor and to console all who mourn (61:2); to give a turban instead of ashes, oil symbolizing joy instead of mourning, a garment symbolizing praise instead of discouragement (61:3).
Closing Prayer
O God our Father, the high and exalted One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy, we marvel that You make Your home not only in the high and holy place, but with the contrite and humble of heart. Come, then, and dwell with us, for we are broken people; and do in us the very work You have promised: not to crush us further, but to revive the crushed spirit and to mend the broken heart.
We thank You that You have thrown open Your house to all peoples, the outsider and the dried-up tree included; and we bless You above all that when there was no man to save us, and no intercessor to stand in the gap our sins had made, You did not abandon us, but Your own arm brought salvation, and the Redeemer came to Zion. We could never have torn down the wall; You tore it down Yourself. Make us a people who turn from transgression, and who show the mercy we have ourselves received (feeding the hungry, sheltering the poor, loving the neighbor) as the glad fruit of so great a salvation; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Redeemer who came to Zion, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.