Companion: Deep Study
A condensed companion to the full study. For each section of the expanded outline: key insights, applications, and the application questions for discussion.
Section 1 — Heaven Is My Throne and the Earth Is My Footstool (Isaiah 66:1–2)
Key Insights
- God asks what house anyone could build for him when heaven is his throne and earth is only his footstool.
- Because his own hand made all things, no building can put him under obligation to the people who raised it.
- The one God says he looks upon is humble, contrite in spirit, and trembling at his word.
- The same description of the person God regards appeared earlier at Isaiah 57:15, and it is the book’s final measure of a worshiper.
- Christ is the true temple, the one who said his own body would be raised in three days, and the perfectly contrite man in whom we are accepted.
Applications
- Name what you are actually relying on before God besides Christ — membership, pedigree, attendance, or reputation.
- Cultivate the three marks God says he looks for by reading Scripture slowly enough to be stopped by it.
- A warning: this is not an argument against church buildings or ordered worship, and a cultivated air of brokenness is one more building we put up to attract God’s notice.
Application Questions
- What am I quietly relying on to make me acceptable to God besides Christ himself?
- Does my reading of Scripture leave me trembling, or merely informed?
Section 2 — Sacrifice Without Obedience and the Terror of Chosen Ways (Isaiah 66:3–6)
Key Insights
- Four shocking equivalences pair the costliest commanded offerings with the most defiling pagan acts.
- The problem is not the sacrifice but the worshiper who has chosen his own ways while still bringing it.
- Because they chose, God chooses — his answer is to bring upon them the very fears their choices contained.
- Verse 5 names persecution from within the covenant family, where brothers cast out brothers using pious language as a taunt.
- Christ was cast out by his own in exactly this way, and his once-for-all sacrifice is what makes all other offerings unnecessary.
Applications
- Ask whether any religious activity of yours is quietly purchasing the right to keep a private sin.
- Bring the life and the offering back into one piece before you bring the gift.
- A warning: verse 5 comforts the excluded but arms nobody, since being disliked is not evidence of faithfulness and discipline is not persecution.
Application Questions
- Is there any part of my life that my religious activity is quietly paying for the right to keep?
- Where have I used pious language to wound another believer?
Section 3 — Zion’s Child Born Before the Labor (Isaiah 66:7–9)
Key Insights
- Zion gives birth before labor, reversing both the curse of Eden and Isaiah’s own repeated images of failed labor.
- Four rhetorical questions press the impossibility: a land born in one day, a nation brought forth in one moment.
- Calvin reads this as a restoration to be judged not by the order of nature but by the grace of God.
- Verse 9 secures the promise by God’s character — the one who brings to the point of birth will not fail to bring forth.
- The pains of this birth were borne by the Servant of Isaiah 53, which is why the birth itself can be painless.
Applications
- Stop treating your arithmetic about the church’s prospects as a prediction about God’s ability.
- Hold verse 9 out to anyone who fears God has begun a work in them and will leave it half-done.
- A warning: this is no rebuke to small or slow ministries, since the sudden ingathering is God’s act and not a technique.
Application Questions
- Where has my discouragement about the church become a judgment about God’s ability?
- Do I believe God will finish what he has begun in me?
Section 4 — Peace Like a River and a Mother’s Comfort (Isaiah 66:10–14)
Key Insights
- Those who love Jerusalem and those who mourn over her are summoned to one and the same rejoicing.
- Peace comes to her like a river — a permanent watercourse, not a seasonal stream — and the glory of the nations flows in with it.
- The verb nacham, “comfort,” sounds three times in verse 13 and closes the movement begun at Isaiah 40:1.
- This is the third and last of Isaiah’s maternal images of God, and the book’s final word of consolation is a mother’s.
- Christ wept over Jerusalem and longed to gather her children, and he sent the Comforter to bring this promise home.
Applications
- Let yourself be comforted like a child, contributing nothing, when you are worn out or ashamed.
- Treat grief over the state of God’s people as a mark of love rather than disloyalty.
- A warning: the maternal simile describes how God comforts and does not license rewriting the name by which he has taught us to address him.
Application Questions
- Am I willing to be comforted, or do I insist on comforting myself?
- Who around me is mourning over the church, and how can I rejoice with them rather than dismiss them?
Section 5 — The LORD Comes in Fire (Isaiah 66:15–17)
Key Insights
- Immediately after the mother’s comfort, the LORD comes in fire, with chariots like the whirlwind.
- Barnes notes that fire is the standard emblem of God coming to judge and punish his enemies.
- The judgment is judicial and universal: God enters into judgment with all flesh.
- Those judged in verse 17 are religiously scrupulous syncretists who consecrate themselves and then follow another into the gardens.
- The fire has already fallen on Christ for all who are in him, which is why the same chapter can hold terror and comfort together.
Applications
- Check that your Sunday consecration and your weekday loyalties belong to the same God.
- Let the certainty of judgment produce both quick repentance in you and patient endurance if you are mistreated.
- A crucial warning: vengeance belongs to God alone, so no believer may relish this judgment or read particular disasters as its installments.
Application Questions
- Does the certainty of God’s judgment change how I live this week, or only what I believe?
- Am I secretly pleased by the thought of God’s judgment on people I dislike?
Section 6 — All Nations Gathered and Gentiles Made Priests (Isaiah 66:18–21)
Key Insights
- God announces that he will gather all nations and tongues, and that they shall come and see his glory.
- Survivors are sent to distant peoples who have never heard his fame or seen his glory.
- The nations are then brought back as an offering, and they are called “your brothers” — answering the hostile brothers of verse 5.
- Verse 21 goes further than any other Old Testament text by taking Gentiles for priests and Levites.
- Christ is the High Priest who makes priests of everyone he redeems, which is why Peter can call Gentile believers a royal priesthood.
Applications
- Name one person near you who has not heard, and pray for them daily.
- Live as a priest by drawing near confidently, offering your daily work, and bringing others to God.
- A warning: the priesthood of all believers does not abolish the ordained ministry Christ gave to his church.
Application Questions
- Whom has God put near me who has “not heard my fame or seen my glory”?
- Do I live as a priest, or as someone waiting for a priest?
Section 7 — New Heavens, Unending Worship, and the Undying Worm (Isaiah 66:22–24)
Key Insights
- The permanence of God’s people is measured by the permanence of the new heavens and new earth he makes.
- From new moon to new moon and Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh will come to worship before him.
- The book’s last verse leaves the rebels outside the city, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
- Jesus quoted this verse in Mark 9:48 as a warning to his own disciples about their own seriousness, not as a description of other people.
- Isaiah 53 and 55 are the only escape the book has offered, and the redeemed of verse 23 are there because of the Servant.
Applications
- Deal decisively with the sin you have been negotiating with rather than managing it further.
- Let the reality of judgment make you compassionate and urgent toward unbelievers rather than comfortable.
- A warning: neither soften this verse nor relish it, and never preach it apart from the gospel that stands beside it.
Application Questions
- What sin am I currently negotiating with that Jesus would tell me to cut off?
- Does the reality of final judgment make me more compassionate toward unbelievers, or more comfortable?
After sixty-six chapters of glory, judgment, empire and Servant, the God whom no temple can hold looks upon the humble and contrite — and in Christ, the true temple and the pierced Servant, he looks upon us.
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