What Yahweh Has Done For His People And the End of Their Enemies (Isaiah 26:11-15).
As in Isaiah 25:1-5; Isaiah 26:8-19 is a prayer as Isaiah has turned his face upwards towards God. And he now delights in Yahweh's activity on behalf of His people. He bewails the fact that although God has been in action the world has not seen it. But he is confident that they will be made to see it because of what God does for His people. While the nations and their gods will decrease, God will increase His own people who have in the past shamefully submitted themselves to other lords because of their unbelief. He will act on their behalf to bring them peace, a peace that they will enjoy because of what He is doing for them and because of their confidence of what He is doing on their behalf
Analysis.
a Yahweh, your hand is lifted up, yet they do not see. But they will see your zeal for your people and be put to shame, yes, fire will devour your adversaries. Yahweh, you will ordain peace for us, for you have also wrought all our works for us (Isaiah 26:11-12).
b O Yahweh our God, other lord's besides you have had dominion over us, but by you only will we make mention of your name (Isaiah 26:13).
c They are dead, they will not live (Isaiah 26:14 a).
c They are shades, they will not rise (Isaiah 26:14 b).
b Therefore you have visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory to perish (Isaiah 26:14 c).
a You have increased the nation, O Yahweh, you have increased the nation. You are glorified. You have enlarged all the borders of the land (Isaiah 26:15).
In ‘a' Yahweh has revealed His zeal for His people and has ordained peace for them and wrought all their works on their behalf, and in the parallel He has caused both their numbers and their borders to expand so that He is glorified. In ‘b' they had had other lords whom they had acknowledged, although now they had turned from them, and in the parallel Yahweh had visited those lords and destroyed them and made their memories perish. In ‘c' and parallel those other lords are now dead meat.
‘Yahweh, your hand is lifted up, yet they do not see. But they will see your zeal for your people and be put to shame, yes, fire will devour your adversaries.'
Speaking to Yahweh he reminds Him that even though His hand is lifted up in judgment and they have to consider His ways, the world fails to see the truth. They do not see His majesty, His glory, or His holiness, they do not see their own sinfulness before Him. They are blind to the truth. They do not learn (Isaiah 26:10), they continue in wrongdoing (deal wrongfully - Isaiah 26:10), they do not see. Their hearts are set in their own ways. They are too ‘lofty'.
But in the end there is something that they will have to see, although it will be too late. They will see what Yahweh does for His people. This may mean that they will see how protective He has been towards them, how zealous towards them (see Isaiah 26:15), and will be ashamed, but it undoubtedly includes the fact that they will see the zeal on behalf of His people which has resulted in their own fiery destruction. Their sense of shame will then be because of the fate that they have suffered. At the back of these latter phrases there may be in mind the idea of the casting out of the bodies of lawbreakers onto the permanent fires outside Jerusalem as a mark of shame (Isaiah 66:24).
‘Yahweh, you will ordain peace for us, for you have also wrought all our works for us.'
Looking back on the past His true people can, in contrast with those in Isaiah 26:11 a, be confident about their future, because of His zeal on their behalf (Isaiah 26:11 b). They recognise that the past reveals that God has worked for them in total sovereignty. All that has been done in the past, all that has been accomplished, all that has been worthwhile, has been the result of His sovereign acts. Therefore they are confident that He will do the same in the future. He will establish them in peace (Isaiah 26:3). For they will be in His strong city of peace (Isaiah 26:3). He will determine and guarantee for them a future of peace in the kingdom of peace (Isaiah 11:6-9) under the Prince of Peace (Isaiah 9:6). They are in His hands. They are confident therefore that His benefits to them will continue to increase, as they have done already (Isaiah 26:15).
This is the divine side of salvation. It is God Who is at work within us to will and to do of His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13), and it is He Who, because He is faithful, will confirm us to the end that we may be unreproveable in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 1:8-9).
‘O Yahweh our God,
Other lord's besides you have had dominion over us,
But by you only will we make mention of your name.
They are dead, they will not live,
They are shades, they will not rise.
Therefore you have visited and destroyed them,
And made all their memory to perish.'
He confirms to Yahweh that they are deeply aware that in the past they have been subservient to other lords, both the human lords, and the divinities they represented. Their history was full of the fact, from Pharaoh onwards. It should not have been. It need not have been. But they had failed to trust in Yahweh, and so it was. And they had been instructed by some of those lords that in their public worship they must recognise that subservience to their other lord, by worshipping his gods. Every conqueror required that his own gods take pride of place in the place of worship. And some of these gods had been set up in the Temple, so that even when they had worshipped Yahweh it had been under the shadow of other gods. It had been deeply distressing and humiliating
But now that will be no more (as he prays he is seeing the future as already certain). From now on their worship of Yahweh will be pure. Other lords and gods will be excluded. Yet it is only ‘by Him', by His activity, and because He has wrought on their behalf, that this has become possible. It is because He has graciously delivered them, that mention will be made of His name. Had He not held them in His hand, had He not wrought for them, they would have had no hope. But He has delivered them by His sovereign power and that is why they can now call on Him and His name. They are in this position simply because He, and He alone, has saved them.
Indeed the frailty and unworthiness for worship of these other lords has been made abundantly clear in that they are now dead. They have become but ‘shades', they are but shadows in the grave of what they were. They will not live again. They will not rise from their graves. They are permanently gone. Yahweh has visited and destroyed them. See especially Isaiah 14:15-20 of the king of Babylon; Ezekiel 32:18-30 of Egypt and many nations. And their gods have gone with them. Even the memory of them has perished. They are no more.
‘You have increased the nation, O Yahweh,
You have increased the nation. You are glorified.
You have enlarged all the borders of the land.'
In contrast, because of Yahweh's intervention on their behalf, because of His zeal shown on their behalf (Isaiah 26:11), whereas their adversaries have been destroyed, their own nation will be increased, for Yahweh will do it, and He will gradually extend their borders. He had done it in the past and He will do it again. They were especially conscious at this time of how small their land had become under Assyrian lordship as a result of their rebellions (at one stage probably less than twenty square kilometres). But that would all be changed again when Yahweh acted. The borders of the land would be enlarged, Israel would be restored, Yahweh would be glorified.
That it so happened to some extent in history, history itself reveals. The people did continually increase from small beginnings and the land was gradually enlarged in the inter-testamental period. But the picture here goes beyond that. For in this chapter we are considering final consequences. So the picture here is more of Yahweh's triumph than of an emphasis on the land, and goes well beyond history. It includes the fact that the numbers of the people of God would be multiplied and their land extended when the Gospel went out to the nations, but that was just a picture of the greater glory yet to come. For His people will finally prosper and flourish to the glory of Yahweh in a new heaven and a new earth (Isaiah 66:22) in the everlasting kingdom when they will be numerous indeed, a multitude which no man can number (Revelation 7:9), and when the land will truly be enlarged. This was what Abraham and his descendants were really looking for (Hebrews 11:10-16). Indeed as we shall shortly see (Isaiah 26:19) Isaiah has in mind the resurrection from the dead of God's people which will marvellously increase the nation. So this can only finally refer to the everlasting kingdom, when death has been swallowed up (Isaiah 25:8).