God's Charge to His Servant (Isaiah 42:5-9).
We continue to see here the joint ministries of Israel and their coming King, reaching out and drawing men within the covenant and bringing them light out of darkness and release from the captivity of sin.
‘Thus says God (El) Yahweh,
He who created the heavens, and stretches them forth,
He who spread abroad the earth and that which comes out of it,
He who gives breath to the people on it,
And spirit to those who walk in it.'
God now gives His charge to His Servant. But before He does so we have a description of the One Who is giving the charge. It is El Yahweh, the Creator and ruler of heaven and earth, Who is active within them. It is He Who constantly stretches out the heavens, maintaining the day, bringing out the stars nightly under His control. He is the One Who made the earth so expansive, and is the cause of the fruitfulness of the earth. He is the One Who is the source of all life and breath and inward spirit, without whose work they would have no life sustaining source. He is the One Who has provided for and sustains all, without Whom no man would have food or life. And thus He is over all and His concern is for all. And His Servant is here to perform His service on behalf of the whole world.
One important implication behind this was that the host of heaven was of His doing and the fruitfulness of the ground was His work. There was no necessity of, or room for any interference from any ‘gods', whether in heaven or earth.
“I am Yahweh, who has called you in righteousness,
And will hold your hand, and will keep you,
And will give you for a covenant of the people,
For a light to the Gentiles,
To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
And those who sit in darkness out of the prison house.”
Note again the stress on righteousness. The Servant is ‘called in righteousness', as was Abraham (Isaiah 41:2). He is accepted as righteous by Yahweh and righteousness is required of him. Abraham believed God and it was counted to him for righteousness (Isaiah 15:6). His initial call was all of God's grace (Isaiah 12:1) but demanded a response in righteousness and it resulted in him becoming righteous before God through faith. The same was true for His people at Sinai. The covenant, which is here seen as directly connected with the person of the Sevant, was an offer of grace, but it had to be accepted, acknowledging a requirement that they be righteous, both by atonement through the shedding of blood and through subsequent obedience. David too was a man of righteousness (1 Kings 9:4). Thus the continual requirement for the Servant is righteousness and acceptability to God and obedience to the covenant, and until Israel are righteous they cannot be His effective Servant. Indeed in the end their being accounted righteous, when they are, will be the result of the work of Another (Isaiah 53:11), the Servant supreme, because they cannot make themselves righteous.
‘And will hold your hand, and will keep you.' Every one who walks as one with The Servant will be able to know that God walks with him and ‘holds his hand', that is, walks alongside him. But it will especially be true of the One Who could say, ‘I a My Father are one'. The holding of the hand is in order to demonstrate that God is with His Servant and working through him, so that he need not fear. It is an expression previously used of ‘Israel - My servant' (Isaiah 41:13 with 8). It is in order to demonstrate that he can know that he is being guided by Him (Psalms 73:23), and will be delivered from danger and from the darkness. The angels held Lot's hand when they delivered him from danger (Genesis 19:16). God will also hold Cyrus' hand when He is using him as His shepherd (Isaiah 45:1). It denotes God's control. It is a strong hand. ‘And will keep you.' The word means to preserve. See Deuteronomy 33:10. Thus the Servant can be sure of the closeness of, and the protecting and confirming presence of, God.
‘And give you for a covenant of the people.' The basic idea is that God's covenant of grace and mercy will be extended to the nations through the Servant who will be its guarantee and mediator. There was a very real sense in which Israel as God's covenant people could offer that covenant to the world, but in the end it was most full offered in Jesus Christ, Who as the Servant came to give His life a ransom for many (Mark 10:45). He contains within Himself all that is the covenant. He is the fulfilment of the offer in the Abrahamic covenant (Genesis 12:3), and this also has in mind the extension of that covenant in the covenant with David (2 Samuel 7:13; 2 Samuel 7:16), and the Davidic covenant promised in Isaiah 55:3. David was the guarantee to his people of God's care and protection through his house by an everlasting covenant, the sure mercies of David, which nothing could rescind. And that covenant was revealed as something that would become worldwide because of the promise to the Davidic King of the future, of worldwide dominion (Isaiah 9:7; Psalms 2). It may be suggesting that the Servant as the greater David will renew and extend that covenant and offer it to the nations (Isaiah 55:3), a guarantee that those who respond to Him will enter into a covenant relationship with God (which would eventually be revealed as through His blood of the new covenant shed for the remission of sins - Matthew 26:28).
Or the thought may be that the nations will be able to enter the covenant of Abraham through uniting with his seed, the Servant, who represents the covenant, and becoming one with them by adoption, thus being guaranteed membership of the covenant. This indeed is what happened to new Christians who were adopted through baptism into the Apostolic (and thus by source Jewish-Christian) community of the people of God and became members of the Israel of God on their conversion (Galatians 6:16), in a community where there was neither Jew nor Greek, but all are one in Christ Jesus, all are the true Israel (Ephesians 2:11-22). For the covenant with Abraham contained within it from the beginning the fact that through him and his seed the whole world would be blessed (Genesis 12:3; Genesis 26:4-5), and it too was an everlasting covenant (Genesis 17:19).
Yet we do not have to choose between them, for in the end there is only one covenant, even though it has many facets. It is God's covenant with His own, continued and expanded through the ages, for God is unchanging.
‘For a light to the Gentiles, to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and those who sit in darkness out of the prison house.' The Servant would through the covenant bring light to the Gentiles. This was a primary work of Immanuel (Isaiah 9:1-6). But this was also to be the work of the spiritual in Israel (Isaiah 49:6). The blind eyes of the nations would be opened, they would be released from their dungeon chains, they would come out of the darkness of the prison house into the freedom and light. They will no longer be darkened in their understanding and alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that was in them because of the hardness of their hearts (Ephesians 4:18). For they will have received light.
“I am Yahweh. That is my name.
And my glory I will not give to another,
Nor my praise to graven images.
Behold the former things are come about,
And new things do I declare.
Before they spring forth I will tell you of them.”
‘I am Yahweh. That is my name.' This is not just the announcing of His name, it is drawing attention to Who and What He is. The name was seen as indicating character and being. And He is Yahweh, the One Who has caused to be from the beginning, the One Who will be, the One Who is there.
And being Yahweh, the living, active God He will not allow the credit for what He has done, ‘the former things', in the raising up of Abraham and David, and what He is going to doing to do, ‘the new things' that He is now declaring, in the effective choosing of the greater David and spiritual Israel, to go to anyone else. Certainly not to graven images. The glory belongs to Him and to Him alone.
So far from this Servant song being an independent unit we find that it is an essential part of the context (although there is nothing to stop it being both, a sacred song incorporated into a context, and yet a part of that context).