The Warrior from Edom

Isaiah 63:1–6 (with Revelation 19:11–16)

Before this session, read Isaiah 63:1–6, and Revelation 19:11–16, where this same vision returns near the very end of the Bible. See the lone Warrior coming up from Edom in royal attire, the one “who is able to deliver” (63:1); His clothes red like one who has stomped on grapes in a vat (63:2–3); “I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself; no one from the nations joined me” (63:3); for “the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come” (63:4, ESV); and “I looked, but there was no one to help … So my right arm accomplished deliverance” (63:5).

Who is this who comes from Edom, dressed in bright red, coming from Bozrah? Who is this one wearing royal attire, who marches confidently because of his great strength? “It is I, the one who announces vindication, and who is able to deliver!”

Isaiah 63:1

Who Is This Who Comes from Edom?

The chapter opens like a scene glimpsed from a watchtower. A sentry, scanning the horizon, sees a lone figure approaching from the south, from the direction of Edom and its chief city Bozrah. And the figure is arresting: majestic in His attire, marching forward in the fullness of His strength, and, as the sentry will soon see, His garments strangely stained. The watchman calls out: Who is this who comes from Edom, dressed in bright red, coming from Bozrah? (63:1). Who is this lone, royal, blood-stained figure, coming up from the land of the enemy in the greatness of His strength?

Notice already, before any explanation has been given, that the figure is alone. The watchman sees no army marching behind Him, no ranks of soldiers, no long train of allies; there is one figure only, coming up from the field of battle in solitary majesty. We might have expected a host returning from a great war; instead there is a single Warrior, and the staining upon His garments is His own work and no one else’s. This solitariness, which the figure will very soon name outright, is the first strange thing about Him, and it is worth holding in mind from the start. Whatever has happened out there, beyond the reach of the watchman’s sight, it was done by One, and by One alone.

The direction matters. Edom was Israel’s ancient enemy: the people descended from Esau, Jacob’s brother, who had nursed a grudge across the long centuries; and Bozrah was one of Edom’s chief cities. In the prophets, Edom often comes to stand for more than one nation alone; it becomes a kind of shorthand for all the hostile powers arrayed against God and His people, the whole proud, God-defying world. So the figure comes up “from Edom,” from the place of the enemy, from the field of battle. He has been where the enemies of God are, and now He is returning from it.

“Who is this?” It is a question the Scriptures ask of Him again and again. The disciples asked it in the storm-tossed boat, when the wind and the sea fell silent at His word: “What sort of person is this?” The crowds asked it as He passed among them; the rulers asked it at His trial; and the whole Bible, in a sense, presses the question of His identity upon us and waits for our answer. And here, as so often, the figure does not leave us to guess at it. He answers for Himself. We are not left to piece His identity together from scattered clues; He tells us plainly who He is, and our task is simply to listen, and to believe what He says of Himself. “Who is this?” is exactly the right question to bring to Him, and He is never slow to answer it.

And the figure answers the watchman’s question Himself, and His answer is the key to the whole passage: It is I, the one who announces vindication, and who is able to deliver! (63:1). Mark both halves of it. He is the one who “announces vindication”: whatever it is He has been doing, it is righteous, the setting right of what was wrong; there is nothing arbitrary, nothing cruel or capricious, in what this figure does; He acts and speaks in perfect justice. And He is “able to deliver.” Even here, in the most fearsome picture of judgment to be found anywhere in the book, with the figure’s garments stained and the enemy’s land behind Him, the name He gives Himself is Deliverer. He is able to save. The Warrior striding up from the battlefield is the Redeemer. We must hold fast to that through everything that follows, for it tells us who this is: not a force of destruction merely, but the One who is able to deliver.

Why Are Your Clothes Red?

The watchman looks again, and sees the staining more clearly now, and asks a second question. Why are your clothes red? Why do you look like someone who has stomped on grapes in a vat? (63:2). Why is the figure red? Why are His garments stained like the clothes of a man who has been treading grapes in the winepress? In the ancient world, wine was made by treading: workers would stamp the grapes underfoot in a great stone vat, and the red juice would splash up and stain their garments and their legs and their feet. The figure looks exactly like that, like a treader of the winepress, splashed and stained a deep red.

It is an image we would rather not linger over, and many in our day would rather skip past it altogether. The wrath of God is not a comfortable subject; there is a strong temptation, in a gentle age, to quietly edit it out of our picture of God, to keep only the tender Shepherd and the welcoming Father, and to set aside the Warrior with the stained garments as a kind of embarrassment, a relic of a harsher and more primitive religion. But we cannot do it, and we must not. For one thing, it is here in the text, in the very same book that gave us the gentlest words of comfort we know. And for another, deeper reason: a God with no wrath against evil would have no gospel to offer us at all, and the cross would make no sense whatever. If sin were not so deadly serious a thing that it must be judged, then the Lord Jesus need never have died for it. The winepress is the dark frame around the cross; take it away, and the cross becomes only a sad and pointless death.

And He answers: I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself … I stomped on them in my anger; I trampled them down in my rage. Their juice splashed on my garments (63:3). The winepress He has trodden is the winepress of judgment, and what stains His garments is, as verse 6 says outright, the blood of His enemies, trampled in His righteous wrath. This is the day of vengeance, the very day the Anointed, in our last session, left unread when He stopped at the comma. Here it has come at last. The judgment of God upon unrepented evil, long deferred all through the patient year of the Lord’s favor, is finally executed; and the figure comes up from the field of judgment with His garments stained.

We must be careful how we understand this, for the picture is fearsome and easily misread. The wrath here is not the petulant rage of a cruel tyrant; it is the righteous anger of a holy God against evil, the very same God who “announces vindication.” A God who never finally moved against evil, who let cruelty and injustice and wickedness run on forever without any reckoning at all, would not be good; He would be indifferent, and indifference in the face of evil is not a virtue. The day of vengeance is the day evil is at last called to account, the day the oppressor is stopped and the wrong is set right. It is terrible, but it is not unjust; it is the necessary other side of redemption. You cannot finally rescue the oppressed without also dealing with the oppressor. And the Revelation takes up this very image at the climax of the whole Bible: a rider on a white horse, called Faithful and True, who with justice judges and goes to war; dressed in clothing dipped in blood; called the Word of God; stomping the winepress of the furious wrath of God; King of kings and Lord of lords. The Warrior from Edom is the returning Christ.

Alone in the Winepress

Of all the words in the figure’s answer, one phrase stands out and asks to be pondered. I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself; no one from the nations joined me (63:3). All by Himself. No one joined Him. He did the work of that terrible day entirely by Himself, with no ally at His side, no army to share the burden, no human hand to help Him. And a few verses on, He says it again, even more plainly: I looked, but there was no one to help; I was shocked because there was no one offering support. So my right arm accomplished deliverance (63:5). He looked about Him for help and found none; He was, in the deepest sense, alone in His work.

We have heard those words before, almost exactly, only a few chapters back. In chapter 59, when God looked for someone to bridge the gap our sin had made, “He sees there is no advocate; he is shocked that no one intervenes. So he takes matters into his own hands” (59:16). It is the same lone Redeemer, the same searching look that finds no helper anywhere, the same hand of God doing the delivering Himself. Whether in the bearing of judgment or in the winning of salvation, the work is His alone, because there is no one else in heaven or on earth who can do it. The aloneness is not incidental to the story; it is woven into the very nature of what He does. No one can help Him save; no one can take a share in the work of redemption.

And here the Christian reader cannot help but see something deeper still, for there was another day on which this same Lord stood in a winepress alone. In Isaiah the blood is His enemies’, and no apostle applies this passage to the cross; but Scripture speaks elsewhere of the cup of the LORD’s anger (51:17), and that cup the Lord Jesus took. Before ever He comes to tread the winepress of judgment, He first entered a winepress Himself, and was Himself trodden in it. In the garden of Gethsemane, on the night He was betrayed, He knelt alone beneath the olive trees and faced a cup He shrank from: the cup of the wrath of God against our sin. He asked three friends to stay awake with Him one hour, and they fell asleep; He asked that the cup might pass, and it would not; and in the end He drank it alone. All by myself; no one from the nations joined me. At the cross what flowed was His own blood; the wrath that fell, He bore Himself; and He bore it utterly alone, forsaken in that hour even by the Father, whose face was hidden from Him. The same Christ who will one day tread the winepress of judgment is the One who first let Himself be trodden, alone, in our place.

We should not pass too quickly over what that cost Him. The garden was no scene of serene acceptance; the Gospels are unsparing about it. He threw Himself down with His face to the ground. His soul was, in His own words, deeply grieved, even to the point of death. His sweat, Luke tells us, was like drops of blood falling to the ground. He prayed the same prayer three times over: that if there were any other way at all, the cup might be allowed to pass from Him. There was a real shrinking in it, a real dread, a real agony of the will, for the cup He was being handed was no ordinary cup of human suffering, but the undiluted wrath of God against the sin of the whole world, and He knew exactly what was in it. That He drank it anyway, and drank it to the very bottom, and drank it entirely alone, is the measure of a love we shall never fully sound. He did not tread that winepress lightly. He trod it in agony, and He trod it for us.

So He is alone in both: alone in the bearing, and alone in the executing. At His first coming He went down, alone, into the winepress of God’s wrath and was crushed there for us, so that the cup we had earned might never touch our lips. At His second coming He will come up from the winepress of judgment, alone, having dealt at last with all the evil that ever oppressed His people. The aloneness is the thread that binds the two together. And here the comfort hidden in this dark passage begins to dawn on us: the One coming up from Edom with stained garments is the very same One whose own blood once stained a cross for us. He trod the winepress alone, first as the trodden and then as the treader, so that we should never have to tread it at all.

My Year of Redemption

At the very heart of the passage stands a single verse that holds together two things we are forever tempted to pull apart. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come (63:4, ESV). We quote the ESV because the Hebrew speaks plainly of redemption, which the NET’s “payback time” obscures. Two things, in one breath: the day of vengeance, and the year of redemption. Judgment, and redemption. And notice: they are not two separate events on some distant timeline; they are one. The very same day that is the day of vengeance is the year of redemption. The trampling of the enemy and the rescue of the people are not two works but one single work.

We are forever trying to pry these two apart, and to keep only the half we happen to like. Some would keep the year of redemption and quietly discard the day of vengeance, wanting a God who saves but never judges. Others, of a harder temper, dwell so heavily on the day of vengeance that the year of redemption is all but forgotten, and God becomes mostly a threat to be feared. Isaiah will let us do neither. He sets the two of them in a single verse, joined by a single “and,” because in the heart of God they are not two competing moods to be anxiously balanced against each other, but one undivided purpose. The God who redeems is the God who judges, and He is both of these because He is good. A love that would not lift a finger against the evil destroying the beloved is not really love at all; and a justice with no heart of mercy in it is not the justice of the God of Isaiah. The one verse holds the whole of Him together.

We met these two words side by side once before, in the passage the Lord Jesus read aloud at Nazareth. He came “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:19), words from Isaiah 61:2, where the very next line reads, “the day when our God will seek vengeance.” There He read out the year of favor and stopped at the comma, leaving the day of vengeance unread, for later. Here, in chapter 63, we have come round at last to the other half of that verse. “My year of redemption” is that year of favor brought to its consummation; “the day of vengeance” is the judgment finally executed. And the two belong together, because they always did. The year of favor and the day of vengeance, the year of redemption and the trampling of the enemy, are the two faces of one single work of God.

And once we see it, we understand why they cannot be separated. To redeem the oppressed is, of necessity, to judge the oppressor; you cannot set the captive free without defeating the one who held him captive. A God who would save His people but never deal with the evil that had destroyed them would not have finished the work; He would have left the wound half-healed. The same act that frees the slave breaks the slaveholder’s power; the same day that wipes away the tears also stops, forever, the hand that caused them. The day of vengeance is not the dark opposite of redemption; it is the very thing that redemption requires. For the redeemed, the final defeat of evil is not a threat but the best of all possible news.

And so this fearsome passage turns out to hold deep comfort for everyone who has ever cried out for justice and wondered whether it would ever come. To the persecuted, the wronged, the ones ground down by powers far too strong for them, to all who have looked at the apparent triumph of evil in this world and asked how long, O Lord, how long, the passage answers: there is a day of vengeance held in the very heart of God. He has not forgotten; He has not grown indifferent; He will not let evil have the last word forever. The wrongs will be set right. The oppressor will be stopped. And the very day that judgment falls upon unrepented evil will be the year of redemption, the day God’s long-suffering people are at last set free, and vindicated, and brought safely home. For them, the day of vengeance is the dawn they have been waiting for through the whole long night.

My Right Arm Accomplished Deliverance

We return for a moment to the verse that so echoes chapter 59. I looked, but there was no one to help … So my right arm accomplished deliverance (63:5). When the figure looked for help in the great work of judgment and redemption, He found none: no one able to stand with Him, no one to support Him, no one to share the load. And so His own arm did it. The deliverance, and the judgment that secures it, is God’s own work, accomplished by His own strength, for the plain reason that there was simply no one else who could.

Every other deliverer the world has ever known has needed help. The greatest general depends upon his army; the wisest ruler depends upon his counselors; every human rescue is a team effort, a pooling of many hands, and it succeeds or fails on whether enough help can be found in time. But here is a Redeemer who needs no help, and finds none, and succeeds anyway, because the strength to save was in His own arm all along. This is not the story of a hero who managed to rally enough allies to win the day; it is the story of One who looked around, saw that there was no one at all, and won the day utterly alone. There is no other deliverance anywhere like it. And it tells us something about the sheer size of the salvation we are dealing with: it was a work far too great for any creature to assist in, a rescue that only God Himself could accomplish, requiring the bared arm of God, and nothing less than that.

There is a strange comfort in that absence of any helper. It means that our salvation, and the final setting-right of all things, does not depend in the least upon us: upon our strength, our faithfulness, our ability to lend a hand. We could not lend a hand; there was no one to help, no one offering support. The whole weight of it rested upon God’s own arm. And an arm that strong does not tire, and a work that God undertakes alone, God finishes alone. If the rescue of the world depended even partly upon us, we would have good reason to tremble for it; but because it depends wholly upon the arm of God, it is as secure as God Himself is. The same lone arm that accomplished deliverance when no one could help is the arm that holds us fast even now.

And because the work is His alone, the glory of it is His alone. No one will stand on the day of redemption and claim a share of the credit; no one helped, no one offered support, no one carried any part of the load. When the Warrior comes up from Edom with the victory fully won, every eye will know that it was God’s own arm that did it, from first to last. This is the gospel’s deepest grammar, the very thing we have heard again and again all through this study: salvation belongs to the Lord; it is His own work, by His own arm, for His own glory. We bring nothing to it at all but the need; He brings everything else, and He brings it alone.

The Wrath We Will Not Face

We dare not leave this passage without hearing its warning, for the warning is real. The day of vengeance is coming. The verse, as we saw at Nazareth, does not end at the comma; after the year of favor comes the day of vengeance, and after the long patience of God comes the reckoning. There is a winepress, and there is a treading, and there is a wrath that will fall upon all unrepented evil. To pretend otherwise, to imagine a God so mild that He will in the end simply wink at every cruelty and shrug off every wrong, is not kindness; it is a lie, and a lie that leaves the oppressed without any hope of justice and the sinner without any warning at all. The Warrior really does come up from Edom, and His garments really are stained.

And it is no kindness to soften that. The truest love warns of real danger; a sentry who saw the enemy coming and said nothing, for fear of alarming the town, would be no friend to it at all. The Scriptures warn of the day of vengeance precisely because it is real, and because God does not wish anyone to meet it unprepared. The love of God does not cancel the justice of God; the two are not at war within Him. He is not so loving that He has ceased to be just, nor so just that He has ceased to be loving; He is perfectly and at once both. And so the warning stands, sober and unedited: there is a reckoning coming for all that is evil, and no one ought to presume upon the patience of God as though the year of favor would simply last forever. It will not. The comma will close. The day of vengeance is the very next line after it.

But for those who are His, the deepest word of this passage is one of overwhelming relief. The wrath that the day of vengeance pours out: we will not face it. And we will not face it for one reason only, that the Lord Jesus has already faced it for us. The cup of God’s wrath against our sin, which by every right should have been pressed to our own lips, He took into His own hand in the garden and drank to the very dregs, alone. He was trodden in the winepress so that we might never be trodden; He bore the fury through so that none of it remains for us. This is why the apostle can say, with such boldness, that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). The condemnation fell already, on Him. The wrath was spent already, on the cross. For those who are in Christ, the day of vengeance holds no terror left, because its wrath has nothing further to collect from them.

Stop and feel the wonder of that exchange. The One who comes up from Edom to tread His enemies is the very same One who once let Himself be counted among them, and trodden in their place. The Judge stepped down from the bench and took the sentence Himself. The Warrior laid aside, for a time, the garments of vengeance and took instead the form of a slave, and went down into the winepress not to tread but to be trodden. He did not merely spare us the cup; He drank it. He did not merely cancel the debt; He paid it in full, with His own blood. This is the great exchange at the very heart of the gospel, His righteousness reckoned to us and the wrath we deserved poured out upon Him, and it means that the day we might once have dreaded above all others is the very day we may now most long for, because the One who comes to judge the world is the One who has already saved us.

And so the passage sets a question before every reader, quietly but unavoidably. The Warrior is coming up from Edom; the day of vengeance is in His heart; and it is, in the same breath, His year of redemption. There are, in the end, only two places to be found standing on that day: among the enemies trodden in the winepress, or among the redeemed who are set free. And the dividing line between them is not how good we have managed to make ourselves; it is whether we are found in Christ, hidden in the One who drank the cup for us. The very same figure is, to the one, a Warrior with stained garments, and to the other, the Redeemer who is able to deliver. He is coming. The only question that finally matters is whether, when He comes, we are found among His redeemed. And the door into that company stands open still, for it is still, even now, the year of the Lord’s favor.

Gathering the Threads

We have watched a lone, royal, blood-stained figure come up from Edom, and we have learned who He is. He announces vindication, and He is able to deliver. His garments are red because He has trodden the winepress of judgment, the day of vengeance at last come. He trod it all by Himself, as He does everything in the work of our salvation, His own arm accomplishing the deliverance when there was no one to help Him. And the day of His vengeance is, in the very same breath, His year of redemption: the judgment that falls upon evil is the very thing that sets His people free. He is the returning Christ of the Revelation, the Word of God, the King of kings; and He is the same Lord who, before ever He came to tread the winepress, first let Himself be trodden in it, drinking the cup of wrath alone, in our place.

So this darkest of passages turns, for those who are His, into one of the most comforting in the whole book. The wrath we deserved has already been borne; the cup has already been drunk; the condemnation has already fallen, all of it upon the Lord Jesus, alone, at the cross. The day of vengeance, when it comes, will find us not among the trodden but among the redeemed, because we are hidden in the very One who was trodden for us. The Warrior who comes up from Edom is, to us, the Savior who is able to deliver. And while the year of favor still lasts, the invitation still stands wide open: come, and be found in Him, and the day of His vengeance will be, for you, the year of your redemption.

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. When the watchman asks “Who is this?”, the figure answers, It is I, the one who announces vindication, and who is able to deliver! (63:1). Why does it matter that, even in this fearsome picture of judgment, He identifies Himself as righteous and as Deliverer? How does this shape the way we read the whole passage?

2. The figure’s garments are red from treading the winepress of judgment (63:2–3). How is God’s wrath against evil different from petulant or cruel rage? Why would a God who never finally judged evil not actually be good?

3. I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself; no one from the nations joined me (63:3). How does this connect to the cross, where the Lord Jesus drank the cup of wrath alone after Gethsemane? What does it mean that He was “alone” both in bearing judgment and in executing it?

4. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come (63:4, ESV). Why can judgment and redemption not be separated? Why is the defeat of evil necessary to the freeing of the oppressed? How is this fearsome verse actually a comfort to those who long for justice?

5. Finding no one to help, the figure says, my right arm accomplished deliverance (63:5), just as in 59:16. Why is there comfort, and not only solemnity, in the fact that no one could help Him? How does this make our salvation secure?

6. For those in Christ, there is therefore now no condemnation (Romans 8:1), because the Lord Jesus drank the cup of wrath in our place. What does it mean that the day of vengeance holds no terror for the redeemed? On what does it depend whether we are found among the trodden or among the redeemed?

Looking Ahead

After the winepress, the new creation. The next session brings us to the very end of the book of Isaiah, and to the end of all things: to the new heavens and the new earth that God promises to make. For look, I am ready to create new heavens and a new earth! The former ones will not be remembered (65:17). God promises a wholly new creation, in which the old troubles are not merely patched up but forgotten outright, gone clean from memory; a new Jerusalem made to be a source of joy, where the sound of weeping is heard no more; where, just as at the book’s beginning, a wolf and a lamb will graze together, and they will no longer injure or destroy on all God’s royal mountain (65:25). The book that opened amid the wreckage of a rebellious people closes with the whole creation made new. After the day of vengeance, the everlasting joy of the redeemed; after the winepress, the wedding feast.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 65 and 66, the closing chapters of the book, and Revelation 21:1–7, where the same vision returns. Hear God promise to create new heavens and a new earth, the former ones not remembered (65:17); to create Jerusalem to be a source of joy, with the sound of weeping never heard in her again (65:18–19); a wolf and a lamb grazing together, with no one injuring or destroying on His entire royal mountain (65:25); the new heavens and new earth that will remain standing, and your descendants and your name with them (66:22); and all people coming to worship Him (66:23).

Closing Prayer

O God our Father, we stand in awe before the vision of Your Warrior coming up from Edom, able to deliver, His garments stained from the winepress of judgment. We confess that Your wrath against evil is just and right, and that we ourselves have given You every cause to number us among Your enemies. We tremble at the day of vengeance, and we have no plea of our own to offer.

But we bless You with our whole hearts that Your Son first entered the winepress alone, and drank to the dregs the cup of wrath that we deserved, so that for us there is now no condemnation. Hide us, we pray, in Him; number us among Your redeemed; and let the day of His coming, which is the day of vengeance upon all evil, be for us the year of our redemption and the dawn of our joy. Keep us watching for Him while it is still the year of Your favor; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Warrior able to deliver, who trod the winepress alone and is coming again in glory, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.