Isaiah Admits The Utter Unworthiness of Those Whom He Represents (Isaiah 64:5-7).
‘You meet him who rejoices and works righteousness,
Those who remember you in your ways,
Behold you were wrathful, and we sinned,
We have been in our sins a long time, and shall we be saved?'
But there is a problem. He acknowledges that the great Responder responds to (meets) those who rejoice and work righteousness, to those whose hearts and wills are right towards Him and whose lives reveal it in obedience to His covenant. But he admits that those on whose behalf he prays are not like this. They are those who are aware that God has been wrathful with them, and yet they still continue to sin. They are therefore wilful sinners, yes, deeply ingrained sinners. They have been sinning for a long time. Can they then indeed be saved? But worse is to come.
‘For we have all become like someone who is unclean,
And all our righteousnesses are as a polluted garment,
And we all fade as a leaf,
And our iniquities like the wind take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name,
Who stirs up himself to take hold of you,
For you have hid your face from us,
And have melted us by means of our iniquities.'
Linking himself with those for whom he prays he describes their total undeserving. ‘Unclean' is the leper's cry (Leviticus 13:45), thus they are to be seen as spiritual lepers. They are all like someone who is unclean, spiritually untouchable, their righteousnesses, their behaviour, which they themselves consider to be good, are in reality ‘like a polluted garment', that is, like a garment rendered unclean by menstruation (the idea behind the Hebrew), something to be avoided with horror (which is how such garments were then seen).
This sense of uncleanness was something he understood very well, for when he had seen the glory of Yahweh in the Temple he had seen himself as totally morally unclean (Isaiah 6:5). He is not thus describing a ritual state, even though he is using such as an illustration, but speaking of a genuine spiritual and moral uncleanness in the sight of God from which men would withdraw with loathing. It refers to something that is within men, and which affects how they are seen outwardly, a moral pollution. Their righteousnesses, all their efforts to please God, are but like leprosy and like clothes which are polluted and fit only to be cast off and burned.
‘And we all fade as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind take us away.' The dried up leaf is the result of the lack of sustenance, the lack of what is good, because contact with the source of its life has been blocked. Thus these people have become spiritually and morally withered because they lack the flow of goodness from the source, from God. And as the wind takes such leaves away, so do their iniquities, the sins that are part of their very nature, carry them away too.
‘There is no one who calls on your name, who stirs up himself to take hold of you.' Furthermore they all are so deep in sin that they do not even call on Yahweh's name, they make no real effort to attract His interest in prayer. So not one of them has any real desire to attract God's attention.
‘For you have hid your face from us, and have melted us by means of our iniquities.' And the reason is because God has hid His face from them. There is no stirring within them. They are spiritually dead. Indeed their sins mean that whenever there is a suggestion of God's approach they recoil from Him, He has made them to melt away from before Him, and this is in a sense God's doing because of what He essentially is.
So Isaiah pulls no punches. He is quite frank and plain about those for whom he prays. Spirituality is almost non-existent among them. The people are dead to God and to morality. If the people of Edom deserved God's judgment, how much more these men of Jacob. Can there then be any hope for them?