Imagine, if you will, a married couple having an argument. One spouse accuses the other of being difficult, or pig-headed, or lazy, or unreasonable, or something. Some harsh words are said by one party. The spouse on the receiving end of it looks at the other, and says, "Hey, wait. That's you. You're the pig-headed, difficult, lazy, unreasonable one." Can we all imagine this, or is it too much of a stretch? You're with me?
Now, imagine that you aren't one of those spouses. Instead, you're hanging out with one spouse or the other, and they have this argument over the phone. You hear one side well enough to know, that you're happy to not be either spouse. But you don't hear everything clearly, word for word. But if you really want to know what's going on, though, you can reconstruct the other person's side. 90% of what's said, isn't that hard to figure out. You can come pretty close, without too much trouble.
That, basically, is the first part of our passage today. It's an argument-- what scholars would call a "disputation"-- between God and his exiled people in Babylon.
Now, this is not the first disputation/argument that we've seen in these chapters. Let's turn back to Isaiah 40:27 (NIV):
27 Why do you complain, Jacob?
Why do you say, Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God”?
In Isaiah 40, Israel complains, in a very careful way, that the path it's on in life is one that is hidden from God. They're stuck in exile, scattered across the Babylonian empire, and the judgment/cause/decision they need to fix this isn't coming.
Maybe that doesn't sound very careful to you. So let me show you how careful this is. Imagine me saying of my wife, "My suffering is hidden from her." That's a very different thing than saying, "My wife doesn't care about my suffering." Right?
Isaiah 40:27 is kind of like with your spouse, in the initial stages of an argument, where you are still trying to be careful with your words, and not have it turn into some great big thing. In the Isaiah 40 argument, God indirectly addresses this careful complaint. He says, "It's not that I don't see you. It's not that I don't care about you. Be a little patient; my help is on its way."
Now, this week's argument/disputation is quite a bit less careful. Our verses are still addressed to God's people who have been scattered into exile across the Babylonian empire. And what we will see in these verses, is an argument about how they ended up there. Why have we lost everything? Why were our cities burned? Why was our wealth looted? Why are we stuck in a strange land, far from home?
The Babylonian exiles have a theory about all of this, and they, on one end of the phone, talk perhaps to God, but I'm guessing mostly to each other, about that theory. That theory revolves around Yahweh, their God, our God, being something of a failure to them. God doesn't pay very close attention to them. God's a bit deaf. He's a bit blind. And this whole situation they're in is completely unfair (Claus Westerman and John Goldingay both unpack all this very nicely).
All of that is the other end of the phone. Our verses don't come out and explain any of this straightforwardly. They don't have to, because our verses are God's response. The exiles know what they've been thinking, and saying. No one needs to tell them those things, and no one does. But what they need, from God's perspective, is to stop saying stupid stuff, and start seeing things from the right perspective. This is that possibly rare kind of argument where one spouse is totally right, and the other is totally wrong. God wants them to stop saying stupid stuff, and thinking stupid things, and so he sends his prophet to respond. [I should maybe say that there's a text-critical issue in verse 19-- a really weird, ambiguous word, that doesn't make much sense and probably should be emended-- but it doesn't really change the meaning of the passage as a whole.]
Now, there's one last thing I need to talk about before I jump in, and that has to do with tone. All this talk about arguments and name-calling could very easily lead us to think that God here is frustrated, or angry, or upset. And it's hard sometimes as readers, to figure out the tone of the passage. These verses would've been performed for the exiles by the (exilic) prophet. How did he sound? How did it come out? At the risk of spoiling my surprise for you, I'll just say up front that this argument doesn't end with judgment, but rather, with words of love and comfort and encouragement. So I think we should God's/the prophet's tone here as being reasonable, as wanting to help, as working very hard to create a better and more stable future. There's no anger here. What God wants, is for his people to learn something really important.
Verse 18-19:
(18) Deaf ones, listen!,
while blind ones, look, so that you may see!
(19) Who [is] blind, except only my servant,
while deaf like my messenger I am sending [or "whom I will send"].
Who is blind like my commissioned one [Hebrew uncertain, see note below, but it doesn't have a huge impact on meaning],
or blind like the servant of Yahweh?
Who is deaf? Who is blind? The only one ("except only") who has these problems, is God's servant Israel (and here again, the servant is very obviously Israel). God has this messenger, this commissioned one, who has severe disabilities. The servant can't hear. He can't see. And yet, this is something that can be fixed. Think about that.
The prophet calls out, "Deaf ones, hear! Blind ones, look!"
This deafness and blindness doesn't have to be a permanent disability. This is something that can be fixed, if the servant is willing.
And so, I understand that we are barely into the argument. But imagine God on one end of the phone saying, "I'm blind? I'm deaf? No, that's you."
Verse 20:
(20) You have seen things,
and you don't pay attention (Deut. 5:32; Ps. 130:3; Prov. 10:17);
[He has] Open ears, and he doesn't hear.
God says, your blindness and deafness is by choice. God's servant has seen things, and heard things. But none of it registered. It's like when you're a kid, being driven somewhere new by a parent. Does the kid have idea where he is? Did he pay attention? Can he get home?
Probably not.
Israel has experienced something, and learned nothing from it. What is that something? It's the exile experience. They've suffered terrible things, and paid attention to none of them.
Verse 21 [A tricky verse, with some weird poetic gapping. Many English Bibles clean it up, connecting the first and second lines by significantly changing the grammar, but perhaps lose something along the way]:
(21) Yahweh was willing (Ruth 3:13) because his righteousness;
He was exalting [his] teaching,
and he proved [it] (Sirach 36:7; HALOT) to be glorious,
Verse 21 doesn't quite make sense, at first glance. Yahweh was willing to do what?
My guess, is that Yahweh was willing to rescue them from the Babylonians. If the people had turned from their idols, and from their mistreatment of each other, then God would've relented from the threatened judgment. A different future was possible. He was willing to do this, because He is righteous. God acts rightly toward his people.
But what God did instead, in bringing judgment, was exalt his teaching, and prove it to be glorious. The teaching here, probably refers to God's threat to send them into exile. We can find this teaching in Deuteronomy 28:36-42 (Deut. 29:1-3 has some nice connections as well here; *Shalom Paul), Isaiah, Jeremiah (5:21; *Shalom Paul), Ezekiel (12:2; *Shalom Paul). In lots of places, God threatens to send his people into exile if they rebel. And when God made good on his threat, he exalted his teaching. And there's one passage in particular I think we are supposed to find ourselves thinking about here. Let's turn to Isaiah 6:8-13 (NRSV updated no reason). These verses describe Isaiah's initial commissioning to be God's prophet:
8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!” 9 And he said, “Go and say to this people:
‘Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand.’
10 Make the mind of this people dull,
and stop their ears,
and shut their eyes,
so that they may not look with their eyes
and listen with their ears
and comprehend with their minds
and turn and be healed.”
11 Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said,
“Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,
and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;
12 until the LORD sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.
13 Even if a tenth part remain in it,
it will be burned again,
like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled.”[c]
(The holy seed is its stump.)
So God has lifted up his teaching, exalted it, by fulfilling this word of judgment on rebellious Israel. At the same time, something else has been lowered, and humbled. Verse 22:
(22) while this [is] a people plundered and looted.
Trapped in holes-- all of them,
while in houses of imprisonment they are hidden away.
They have become like plunder,
and there isn't a rescuer;
Loot,
and there is no one saying,
"Restore!"
That is the current situation of the exiles. They're stuck, trapped. They're loot for foreigners. And there's no one whose been helping them. On this point, God and Israel are both in agreement. But the argument, revolves around why this has happened. Is God blind and deaf? Or is Israel?
God finishes his opening argument, verses 23-25, by calling on deaf Israel, to listen, and learn:
(23) Who among you will hear this?,
will listen, for the future? [also Isaiah 41:23]
(24) Who gave, as loot, Jacob,
while Israel to the plunderers?
Isn't it Yahweh, whom we have sinned against?,
and they weren't willing in his ways to walk,
and they didn't hear/obey his teaching,
(25) and He poured out upon them the wrath of his anger, and the power of war,
and it (=the wrath) set him on fire all around,
and he didn't know/understand,
and it burned against him,
and he didn't set it upon his heart. ["he didn't take it to heart"]
So God says this: "The reason you ended up here, with burnt out homes, having lost everything, is because I poured out my wrath on you. It's not that I was blind, or deaf. I was the one who caused all of this. And I did this because you didn't listen to me teaching. Instead, you sinned."
What God is saying here, is something that makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes when life falls apart, it's because God is actively pouring out his anger on us. Not always, but sometimes. This is something that we shy away from. It's something we find ourselves wanting to push back against. But it's the truth. [1 Corinthians 11:30, many were sick among you. This can be true for individuals, I think, and it can be true for the church as a whole.] God brings judgment on his people, and that judgment is designed to wake people up, to make it so that they see and hear the truth about God, and God's desired way of life ("misphat"), and how they are rebelling against that.
And the real tragedy in all of this, isn't the judgment. It's that Israel learned nothing from the experience. Why were its cities burned? Why did it end up in exile?
Israel argued that the reason for this was because God neglected them. He's blind, and deaf. God wasn't paying attention to them. He didn't see them; He didn't hear them.
And God's like, "No, actually that's you. You were the only one who was blind and deaf. You're in exile because you weren't willing to obey. You got burned, and looted, and imprisoned, because you sinned.
You're here because this is what God does to rebellious people, and the fact that you're blaming him, accusing him of unrighteousness, shows you've learned nothing."
So God/the prophet asks, are you ready to hear this (verse 23) now? Will you learn now, so that you can have a better future, so that this doesn't happen again?
If God was challenging me in an argument about all of this, I'd expect at this point for God to perhaps finish me off. I wouldn't even blame him, right? But what God is trying to do here, isn't just "win" the argument. God has this vision for his people, for his servant. He wants them to be a light to the nations. He wants them to teach the nations his desired way of life ("misphat"; Isaiah 42:4). He wants them to bring all peoples to him, to worship and serve him (Isaiah 42:8). He wants them to open eyes that are blind (Isaiah 42:7).
And God wants to do this by using a servant who is itself currently blind and deaf, and who struggles to learn from anything. It's rough, right?
This huge gap between God's vision for his people, and what his people are, is part of why some people/scholars split out the four "servant songs" from the many repeated references to God's people as servant. They can't figure out how these two things can go together. How can God's people teach the nations God's desired way of life, and be a light to the nations, when they are blind and deaf, and don't understand anything?
But this, is basically the thing God is trying to fix. If Israel will see and hear, then Israel can become a great servant. [Christopher Seitz, reference near the bottom, in particular does a nice job explaining all of this].
So God is in the process of building this new future for his people. He's commissioned them for this high and holy calling. And now God needs a servant who can see and hear the truth. Who among you will learn from what you've suffered? Who will take it to heart, and change how you live from now on? Who will choose to move from deafness and blindness, to hearing and seeing clearly?
So are we all tracking the argument so far? In a nutshell, verses 18-25 say that the reason Israel has suffered, and is in exile, is because they were blind and deaf toward God, and sinned against him. And God responded by pouring his wrath on his people, bringing his judgment on them. And this is a great time to learn from that experience, and commit to God, so that God can give you the better future He wants to give.
This brings us to chapter 43. This is not really a new section. God continues his argument. He moves from explaining their past, and current situation, to talking about how He feels about them, and what He's about to do for them in the very near future.
Let's pick back up in Isaiah 42:25, and keep reading through verse 4:
(25) and He poured out upon them the wrath of his anger, and the power of war,
and it (=the wrath) set him on fire all around,
and he didn't know/understand,
and it burned against him,
and he didn't set it upon his heart, ["he didn't take it to heart"]
(1) while now, Thus has said Yahweh, The One Creating you, and The One Forming you, O Israel:
"May you not fear,
because I have redeemed you.
I have called by your name.
Mine, you [are]. ["mine" is focused]
(2) When you pass through in the waters, with you I [am]; ["with you" is focused],
while in the rivers, they shall not flow over you.
When you walk through fire, you won't be scorched,
while the flame won't burn you,
because I [am] Yahweh your God/Elohim,
The Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I have given as your ransom, Egypt;
Cush and Seba in your place.
(4) because you are precious in my eyes;
you are honored/glorified,
while I have loved you,
that/and I give people in place of you,
while nations in place of your life [the word often translated "soul].
In these first four verses, God encourages his people, "Don't be afraid. The days of my anger and wrath are done. I've purchased you, by giving a few nations, Egypt, Cush, and Seba in your place." The idea is that God is paying Mystery Dude from the east to come and rescue his people, and God is giving Mystery Dude those three peoples as payment.
God reassures his people, "I love you. I know you ("called you by name"). You're precious to me."
Imagine that you're in exile, hearing these words. Do you feel yourself becoming less scared? Do you feel something inside of you wanting to trust God?
In verse 5, God starts back up, a second time:
(5) May you not fear,
because with you, I [am].
From the east, I will gather you.
(6) I will say to the north,
"Give!,"
while to the south,
"May you not hold back!"
Bring my sons from far off,
while my daughters from the end of the earth--
(7) all the ones being called by my name--
while for my honor/glory I have created him;
I have formed him.
What's more, I have made him.
So God encourages his people again, "May you not fear. I'm with you. In the very near future, I will gather you from all the places you've been scattered. And all of this isn't just about how much I love you. It's also about my own reputation (It's important we hold both of these together, and not lose sight of the first one). I created you, and formed you, and made you, for my own glory." And the idea here, is that when God brings his people home, He will give himself glory. All the nations will see that Yahweh is controlling these world events. Yahweh has power over all the gods, and idols. And everyone who is called by God's name (if this was Revelation, it's the same idea as having God's name stamped on their foreheads) will get to come home.
So your life is really hard right now, because of your own sin. You've been living under God's anger and judgments for decades. But that time has come to an end. Learn from your experience, and learn from the good that God is about to do for you. Understand that when you get to come home, that this is God rescuing you. It's not a happy coincidence. It's not random. It's God.
[Pause]
That's as far as I want to go today into Isaiah 43. But all I wanted to do in chapter 43, is do two things. First, to help you to see God's tone in this whole passage, how it's encouraging, and comforting. And second, I wanted you to see how God contrasts their past, with their future. The days of judgment are done; the days of rescue are here.
Now, when we read passages like this, one of the things we find ourselves wrestling with as Christians, is whether things are fundamentally different for us in Christ, than they were for God's people exiled in Babylon?
Did God pour out his anger on Jesus completely, fully, permanently, so that God is never angry with us, and never brings judgment on us? In Christ, do we always stay in God's good graces? In Christ, should we just memorize the encouraging words of Isaiah 43, and just set Isaiah 42:18-25 to the side?
Anyone who knows me at all knows that I have really strong opinions on this, and that this is one of very few hills that I will die on. Let's read a little bit from 1 Corinthians 10. As I read, just ask the question I asked. Are God's judgments all poured out on Jesus, or can we still fall under them today?
10 I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did. 7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did, as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play.” 8 We must not engage in sexual immorality, as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand FELL in a single day. 9 We must not put Christ[a] to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents. 10 And do not complain, as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. 11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come. 12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not FALL. 13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
14 Therefore, my beloved, flee from the worship of idols.
Paul thinks that the OT was written for our instruction, as a warning to us. He wants the Corinthian church to stop going to idol temples, and eating sacrifices offered idols, because this is the kind of behavior that leads to God killing his people. God will not tolerate this, OT or NT. And our relationship to Christ doesn't change any of this (that's why Paul describes Israel as being the church, basically, living in/under Christ, in verses 1, 2, 3, 4, 9).
If we argue otherwise, I think two really bad things can happen as a result. The first, is that we will fail to recognize God's judgments and anger, when they come against us. We will be blind, and deaf, to what God is doing. We will decide that life is simply falling apart. Or we will decide that God is blind and deaf. Or we will decide that this is simply God's will for our lives, and we should accept the good with the bad.
The second really bad thing that can happen, is that we fail to learn. (and this is the piece that I find myself appreciating far more after these verses this week; this was really helpful to me). God is trying to move his people from a place of sin and rebellion to place of faithful service. He has this high and holy calling for his people, and they can't fulfill this calling if they are spiritually blind and deaf. If you're not following God's desired way of life, you can't teach God's desired way of life to others.
Now, it's possible that even if we are blind and deaf, and living in rebellion, that God will offer us a good future, and redeem us. Perhaps, God will give us an Isaiah 43 message of comfort, even if we've changed nothing, and learned nothing. That's what we are seeing here-- God is planning to bless his people, in hopes that they will return to him [but it's after they've paid for their own sins through punishment; Isaiah 40:1-2, so I wouldn't put too much weight on this). At the same time, if we are blind and deaf, and cling to our sin, there's also the possibility that we will be like the 23,000 that fell in the wilderness. It's hard to know what God will do with us, if we don't we persist in rebellion.
I think at this point, the most helpful thing I could do is tell two stories I'd rather not tell, about when God's judgment fell on me.
The first, was that for a long time I lived as a slave to pornography. It was just part of my life. I'd feel terrible about it. I'd confess it. And I'd be right back at it a day or two or three later. Lots of confessing. Not a lot of real repenting.
Now, pornography, by itself, even apart from any talk about God, is really a terrible evil, in many ways. It opens you up to the demonic. It twists everything. But in addition to the bad things that naturally come through that (like something out of Proverbs, where bad things tend to naturally result from doing bad things), I'm quite sure that God gave me a couple of physical health problems as judgment on me. I developed a foot problem because of pornography. And in a story I'm still not ready to share, that I've only told maybe 2 people, God brought me within 2 seconds of dying a really terrible, horrifying death. A closed casket kind of death, for sure.
All of that was God's judgment, and his way of trying to remove my blindness, and deafness, and bring me to a place of faithful service (cf. Deuteronomy 28:59-61). Eventually, those judgments are part of what brought me back (the other part-- the main part-- was deciding I didn't want to fail to enter God's kingdom because of sexual immorality; 1 Corinthians 6:9. It wasn't worth it).
The second story I'd rather not tell, has to do with tithing. For a while, I stopped tithing completely. And weirdly enough, things started to fall apart financially for us. Now, it's hard to know sometimes, if things are bad simply because you have old things that break a lot, or because you make investments that simply don't work out, or whatever. But I'm confident, again, that God brought financial judgment on our house because I was stealing from God. I found that I bought high, and sold low. I invested in companies that went bankrupt. And I didn't learn from these judgments at all, for quite a long time. I was blind and deaf to them. But eventually, I listened to Paul, in 2 Corinthians 9:6-11, when he talks about how those who sow generously will reap bountifully. I confessed my sin to God, and I told him I would start I trusting him to provide for us, and that I would start tithing, and that I'd make up what I'd stolen. When I did this, before my first check to the church cleared the bank, God blessed me financially, in three separate, big ways. He gave me many multiples of that amount, and let me know that He would keep his word. The thing that impressed me most, was that an acquaintance-- not a close friend, an acquaintance-- felt led to give us half a cow that next week. God doesn't do that every week, but He let me know I was doing the right thing, and that He would watch over me, and I would be more than okay financially.
Even this past year, when I was doing taxes, I realized that I'd ripped God off. There's always a moment, when you're doing your taxes, when you see in black and white how you made, and how much you gave. And the math is really simple. Did you tithe, or did you steal? Some of you here this morning know precisely how much you stole from God last year.
And even though I thought I was always careful to give over a tithe, I realized I'd stolen a little under $1,000 from God. So I wrote a check for a thousand, apologizing, asking for forgiveness. It was sloppiness, but sloppiness isn't really an excuse (the Pharisees did well in Matthew 23:23-24 in being careful about tithing; it was their neglect of other things that was the problem). Within four days, we heard from one of the colleges my daughter applied to, that the college had reconsidered their scholarship offer and upped it by $1,000 for each of the four years she'd be there.
Quite a coincidence, right? Now, I don't think in that situation I'd fallen under God's judgment. But He certainly blessed me, once I became faithful.
I say all of this about the pornography and the tithing, despite how embarrassing it is to me, because I want you to understand that you can fall under God's judgment. You don't necessarily live in a place of permanent favor with God (contra some well-known charismatics, in particular). God can be angry with you. He can pour out his wrath on you. And if you reject this idea, you're choosing to be blind and deaf, and you're making it impossible to learn.
In a perfect world, the least painful way to learn, is by learning from other people's mistakes. Hopefully, we can look at how God's wrath has been poured on his own people, and think about that, and decide that we don't want that for ourselves. I don't want my house burned, my possessions looted, and to end up in a strange land.
But if we insist in doing things the hard way, and persisting in rebellion in some area of our life-- with money, with sexuality, with unforgiveness-- it's important that we become able to look at our lives, and be honest about our sins, and be aware that sometimes when things are falling apart, it's because we are experiencing God's anger and judgments. Not every bad thing that happens is God's judgment. But sometimes, it is. Sometimes when (1) I'm living in sin, and and (2) my life is falling apart in some way, it's because those things are God's judgments. 2+2 sometimes equals 4. And what God hopes, is that we will have eyes to see, and ears to hear, so that we will learn from God's judgments, when they come.
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Quote from Christopher Seitz, whose commentary is well-worth buying:
Christopher Seitz, "Isaiah 40-66," in The New Interpreter's Bible, volume 6, 370-71:
"With judgment an avenue is opened up, into which confession and acknowledgement of guilt are channeled. This road requires painful self-reflection and may at times seem so exceedingly narrow that we simply cannot start down it... Efforts to lift the spirits by therapeutic encouragement and avoidance of 'judgmentalism' must carefully assess whether God's judgments are, in fact, at work. This does not mean conjuring them up but asking the harder question: where and how and whether they are already being experienced in some way that God positively intends. Removing the language of judgment from our worship and discourse may only allow us to persist in blindness and never the know the widest range of what God intends for us, as we find places of blindness, deafness, and imprisonment transformed under divine judgments."
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That to me is the real tragedy of many contemporary Western churches. Their theology keeps them from being able to move from a place of blindness and deafness and God's judgment, to a place of understanding, and repentance, and restoration. It keeps them from fulfilling God's vision for what his faithful servant can do in the world, for the nations. Their theology keeps them from learning.
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The NET Study Bible note on 42:6, "Who is blind like my commissioned one." I could very easily be wrong in the choice I made, but just had to make a decision one way or another:
39 tc The precise meaning of ????????? (méshullam) in this context is uncertain. In later biblical Hebrew the form (which appears to be a Pual participle from the root ??????, shalam) occurs as a proper name, Meshullam. The Pual of ?????? (“be complete”) is attested with the meaning “repaid, requited,” but that makes little sense here. BDB 1023 s.v. ?????? relates the form to the denominative verb ?????? (“be at peace”) and paraphrases “one in a covenant of peace” (J. N. Oswalt suggests “the covenanted one”; Isaiah [NICOT], 2:128, n. 59) Some emend the form to ???????? (moshélam, “their ruler”) or to ??????????? (méshullakhi, “my sent [or “commissioned”] one”), which fits nicely in the parallelism (note “my messenger” in the previous line). The translation above assumes an emendation to ?????? ???????? (kémo sholémi, “like my ally”). Isaiah uses ?????? in 30:22 and perhaps 51:5; for ??????? (“my ally”) see Ps 7:5 HT (7:4 ET).
Translation:
(18) Deaf ones, listen!,
while blind ones, look, so that you may see!
(19) Who [is] blind, except only my servant,
while deaf like my messenger I am sending [or "whom I will send"].
Who is blind like my commissioned one
or blind like the servant of Yahweh?
(20) You have seen things,
and you don't pay attention (Deut. 5:32; Ps. 130:3; Prov. 10:17);
[He has] Open ears, and he doesn't hear.
(21) Yahweh was willing (Ruth 3:13) because his righteousness;
He was exalting [his] teaching,
and he proved (it) (Sirach 36:7; HALOT) to be glorious,
(22) while this [is] a people plundered and looted.
Trapped in holes-- all of them,
while in houses of imprisonment they are hidden away.
They have become like plunder,
and there isn't a rescuer;
Loot,
and there is no one saying,
"Restore!"
(23) Who among you will hear this?,
will listen, for the future? [also Isaiah 41:23]
(24) Who gave, as loot, Jacob,
while Israel to the plunderers?
Isn't it Yahweh, whom we have sinned against?,
and they weren't willing in his ways to walk,
and they didn't hear/obey his teaching,
(25) and He poured out upon them the wrath of his anger, and the power of war,
and it (=the wrath) set him on fire all around,
and he didn't know/understand,
and it burned against him,
and he didn't set it upon his heart. ["he didn't take it to heart"]
(43:1) while now, Thus has said Yahweh, The One Creating you, and The One Forming you, O Israel:
"May you not fear,
because I have redeemed you.
I have called by your name.
Mine, you [are]. ["mine" is focused]
(2) When you pass through in the waters, with you I [am]; ["with you" is focused],
while in the rivers, they shall not flow over you.
When you walk through fire, you won't be scorched,
while the flame won't burn you,
because I [am] Yahweh your God/Elohim,
The Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I have given as your ransom, Egypt;
Cush and Seba in your place.
(4) because you are precious in my eyes;
you are honored/glorified,
while I have loved you,
and/that I give people in place of you,
while nations in place of your life [the word often translated "soul].
(5) May you not fear,
because with you, I [am].
From the east, I will gather you.
(6) I will say to the north,
"Give!,"
while to the south,
"May you not hold back!"
Bring my sons from far off,
while my daughters from the end of the earth--
(7) all the ones being called by my name--
while for my honor/glory I have created him;
I have formed him.
What's more, I have made him.
