Is There No One To Answer When Yahweh Has The Power and the Will To Deliver? (Isaiah 50:1-3).
Yahweh now rebukes His people. He points out that their failure to enjoy His blessings cannot be laid at His door. He has not turned away from them and divorced them. He has not sold them off as a creditor sells off his children. Their present position and condition is entirely due to their own fault.
Indeed His power is not diminished at all. He is still powerful enough to dry up the sea with a rebuke, as He did in Egypt, and make the rivers a wilderness as He did to the Assyrian forces around Jerusalem, and will do to Assyria and Babylon. Note how this is the very opposite of what He has promised for His people. Such language refers as much to blessing and judgment, as it does to natural events. Overflowing water means blessing, drought means judgment.
The problem is rather that there is no one on whom He can call who will respond to His words. There is no one on whom He can rely, through whom He can deliver them. God is looking for a man to stand in the gap.
‘Thus says Yahweh,
“Where is the bill of your mother's divorce with which I put her away,
Or which of my creditors is it to which I have sold you?
Look, because of you iniquities you were sold,
And because of your transgressions your mother was put away.”'
God now points out that it is not He who has divorced them, it is they who have gone away from Him as a result of their sins, through their iniquities and transgressions. It is not He Who has sold them in order to pay off His debts, it is they who have sold themselves to sin.
Here the thought in Isaiah 49:14 is now being dealt with, the suggestion that Yahweh had forgotten Zion and treated her badly. Yahweh stresses that firstly He has not divorced the children of Jacob's mother, the stem of Jacob. They have simply been separated from Him for a while. The covenant has not been finally cancelled, only suspended. And secondly that His children have not been sold off to pay His creditors. A creditor had rights against a debtor to obtain payment by the sale of a man's children. But Yahweh has no creditors. He has no need to sell off His children. Any suggestion therefore that He has been unfair or blameworthy is false. The reason why they were ‘sold' into enemy hands was rather because of their iniquities (the wickedness of the inner heart), and their mother was put away because of her sins, her transgressions (outward disobedience and rebellion). All the blame lies with them.
“Why when I came was there no man?
When I called was there no one to answer?
Is my hand shortened at all that it cannot redeem,
Or have I no power to deliver?”
Indeed the opposite situation pertains. When He came and sought for a man to assist Him, there was no man. And when He called for response there was no answer. It was they who had forgotten Him. He had wanted to save and deliver. He had wanted to buy them back. He had the means to do so. His hand was not too short (see Numbers 11:23), His power was not so limited. But what was lacking was a man, the right man. There had been no man willing to facilitate the task. That was the reason that things were as they are. (There may here be the thought that Ahaz and Hezekiah had proved themselves not worthy, as had all the other sons of David).
The idea of God calling for a man takes us back to man's beginnings when God walked in the Garden and called to a man. Then there was an answer, but it was, alas, the wrong one. There was no right answer. There was no one to say, ‘Here I am'. And that is the point here, that God was looking for the right answer. But, alas, there was no answer.
It is significant that in the same way, when the same situation was earlier put to idolaters there was no response from them also (Isaiah 41:28 to Isaiah 42:4), then too there was no man, in that case it was also followed by the coming of the Servant, as here. Each call for a man is therefore followed up with a description of the Servant, God's man to fill the breach.
It is significant also that Isaiah does not see himself as possibly being that man. He knows that God is talking about Immanuel, Who alone can fill the role.
“Behold at my rebuke I dry up the sea.
I make the rivers a wilderness.
Their fish smell because there is no water, and they die of thirst.
I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their covering.”
God then reminds them that there was no reason to doubt that He had the power. His power to redeem and deliver had been revealed in the past, when He dried up the sea for Israel to pass through at the Exodus (Exodus 14:21). When He makes the rivers a wilderness all the fish stink and die (Exodus 7:18; Exodus 7:21). This was true in Egypt, it will also be true for Assyria and especially Babylon. In Egypt the heavens became pitch black so that a man could not see his fellow (Exodus 10:22-23), and they were covered as with sackcloth because of what was happening. There is possibly in this last the reminder of the death of the firstborn. But the same is true throughout history. He makes the heavens black with judgment, or not, as He wishes.
The idea is probably intended to go beyond the Exodus as a reminder that Yahweh has life and death in His hands at all times, of which Egypt was but an example. For if rivers dry up it is not only fish that die, but men also. And sackcloth is also a sign of continual mourning. So this could be seen as the heavens in mourning because of what Yahweh's judgments would do. This being so, Yahweh has shown that He is well able to deliver, and to deal with the hostility of the most powerful foes.