15 Let your eyes be looking down from heaven, from your holy and beautiful house: where is your deep feeling, the working of your power? do not keep back the moving of your pity and your mercies:
So, looking down from your holy place in heaven, send your blessing on your people Israel and on the land which you have given us, as you said in your oath to our fathers, a land flowing with milk and honey.
How may I give you up, O Ephraim? how may I be your saviour, O Israel? how may I make you like Admah? how may I do to you as I did to Zeboim? My heart is turned in me, it is soft with pity.
<A Song of the going up.> To you my eyes are lifted up, even to you whose seat is in the heavens.
Come back, O God of armies: from heaven let your eyes be turned to this vine, and give your mind to it,
Yes, he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and salvation as a head-dress; and he put on punishment as clothing, and wrath as a robe.
But if a man has this world's goods, and sees that his brother is in need, and keeps his heart shut against his brother, how is it possible for the love of God to be in him?
Because of the loving mercies of our God, by which the dawn from heaven has come to us,
Till the Lord's eye is turned on me, till he sees my trouble from heaven.
It was no sent one or angel, but he himself who was their saviour: in his love and in his pity he took up their cause, and he took them in his arms, caring for them all through the years.
But is it truly possible that God may be housed on earth? see, heaven and the heaven of heavens are not wide enough to be your resting-place; how much less this house which I have made!
For this is the word of him who is high and lifted up, whose resting-place is eternal, whose name is Holy: my resting-place is in the high and holy place, and with him who is crushed and poor in spirit, to give life to the spirit of the poor, and to make strong the heart of the crushed.
Awake! awake! put on strength, O arm of the Lord, awake! as in the old days, in the generations long past. Was it not by you that Rahab was cut in two, and the dragon Wounded? Did you not make the sea dry, the waters of the great deep? did you not make the deep waters of the sea a way for the Lord's people to go through?
Will a woman give up the child at her breast, will she be without pity for the fruit of her body? yes, these may, but I will not let you go out of my memory.
Of the increase of his rule and of peace there will be no end, on the seat of David, and in his kingdom; to make it strong, supporting it with wise decision and righteousness, now and for ever. By the fixed purpose of the Lord of armies this will be done.
Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, Looking down on the heavens, and on the earth?
Lord, where are your earlier mercies? where is the oath which you made to David in unchanging faith?
Will the Lord put me away for ever? will he be kind no longer? Is his mercy quite gone for ever? has his word come to nothing? Has God put away the memory of his pity? are his mercies shut up by his wrath? (Selah.)
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Isaiah 63
Commentary on Isaiah 63 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 63
In this chapter we have,
So that, upon the whole, we learn to embrace God's promises with an active faith, and then to improve them, and make use of them, both in prayers and praises.
Isa 63:1-6
It is a glorious victory that is here enquired into first and then accounted for.
In this representation of the victory we have,
Isa 63:7-14
The prophet is here, in the name of the church, taking a review, and making a thankful recognition, of God's dealings with his church all along, ever since he founded it, before he comes, in the latter end of this chapter and in the next, as a watchman upon the walls, earnestly to pray to God for his compassion towards her in her present deplorable state; and it was usual for God's people, in their prayers, thus to look back.
Isa 63:15-19
The foregoing praises were intended as an introduction to this prayer, which is continued to the end of the next chapter, and it is an affectionate, importunate, pleading prayer. It is calculated for the time of the captivity. As they had promises, so they had prayers, prepared for them against that time of need, that they might take with them words in turning to the Lord, and say unto him what he himself taught them to say, in which they might the better hope to prevail, the words being of God's own inditing. Some good interpreters think this prayer looks further, and that it expresses the complaints of the Jews under their last and final rejection from God and destruction by the Romans; for there is one passage in it (ch. 64:4) which is applied to the grace of the gospel by the apostle (1 Co. 2:9), that grace for the rejecting of which they were rejected. In these verses we may observe,