Isaiah 65:25 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

The wolf and the lamb... — The words point to what have been called the discords in the harmony of Nature, the pain and death involved, of necessity, in the relation of one whole class of animals to another. In St. Paul’s language, the “whole creation groaneth and travaileth together” (Romans 8:22). In the new heaven and the new earth of the prophet’s vision there would be no such discords. The flesh-eating beasts should change their nature; even the serpent, named, probably, with special reference to Genesis 3, as the starting-point of the discords, shall find food in the dust in which he crawls, and shall be no longer a destroyer. The condition of the ideal Paradise should be restored. The picture finds a parallel, perhaps a replica, in Virgil, Ezekiel 4Ezekiel 4. Do the poet and the prophet stand on the same footing? or may we look for a literal fulfilment of the words of the one, though not of the other? The answer must be given in words that are “wary and few.” We dare not, on the one hand, fix times and seasons, or press the letter of prophetic visions as demanding a fulfilment. On the other, the permanence of Israel as a people suggests the possibility of a restored Jerusalem, and modern theories of evolution point to the gradual elimination of the fiercer animals as part of the conquests of humanity.