I. This is nothing less than a prayer that God would manifest Himself as a Judge yes, and as a Destroyer. Isaiah craved for a man who should deliver men from the oppressions of the world's tyranny, from the storms which are raised by the passions of peoples and rulers, from the weariness and exhaustion which follow when they have accomplished their projects with great labour, and nothing comes out of them. All the misery which they cause springs, so the prophet thinks, from their assuming to be gods themselves, and from the disbelief which they cherish, and which they generate in a God who is altogether unlike them, whose ways are not their ways, whose purposes are not their purposes. And what he longed for was that the true man should appear, who would thoroughly manifest the ways and purposes of the true God, who would remove the thick veil which had intercepted His light from reaching His creatures, who would make them know that He was present with them, that He was ruling them and judging them. To long then for a man who should be a hiding-place from the tempest and a covert from the storm or heat, was the very same thing as to long that God would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would flow down at His presence.
II. There is a natural heart in all of us which is averse from this prayer, which would rather utter any prayer than this. And there is a natural religion which adapts itself to these cravings of ours, and supplies them with a language. To keep God at a distance from men is the end which it proposes to itself; to convert all persons who perform its offices, all prayers and dogmas, into barriers more or less secure against His appearing, and His vengeance, is its art. This religion expresses all differentfeelings of men, in different conditions of disease. It does not express the one commonfeeling of men, to be raised out of their diseases, to be made whole. It has no language for the infinite craving after God, the intense longing to be brought face to face with Him to encounter all His vengeance rather than be separated from Him which dwells in every man. The universal prayer the prayer that goes up from the whole heart of humanity is this of Isaiah's.
III. The prophet had been disciplined to understand that man does not require to be protected against God, but that God should protect him against himself, and should raise him out of the slavery which he invents for himself. Thus did he learn to rejoice, even while he trembled, at the convulsions in the outward world, or in human society. Thus did he understand that by all such signs God was avenging the cause of the poor, of those who had no helper, was shaking kings on their thrones, was surprising the hypocrites. Thus was Isaiah made into the evangelical prophet, the witness that unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given, who can be a covert from the tempest, because He is both the Son of man and the Son of God; because God appearing in Him does indeed rend the heavens and come down.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. vi., p. 179.
References: Isaiah 64:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxvi. No. 1538; Isaiah 64:4. H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2466.; J. Keble, Sermons for Sundays after Trinity,Part I., p. 212.