- Isaiah 57 BSB ↗
Most towns have someone like this: a quiet, decent person who dies and hardly makes the local news, while louder people carry on as if nothing has happened. Isaiah 57 opens with exactly that. The righteous perish and no one takes it to heart. Then the chapter turns hard on a community that has drifted back into the hillside rites of the old land, under the green trees and down in the valleys. And then, just as sharply, it turns again. The God who is 'high and lifted up', who lives in eternity, says he also lives somewhere else: with the one who is crushed and low in spirit.
Where it sits in the story: In Act 3 of the story, Israel is back in the land, but coming home has not made the people new. Isaiah 56 opened the door to foreigners and eunuchs and closed on careless, sleeping watchmen; chapter 57 shows what grows under such leaders. Its closing promise of peace 'to the far and to the near' reaches forward to the welcome of outsiders the New Testament will pick up (Ephesians 2:17).
What this chapter is doing: To expose a community that has slid back into the forbidden worship of Israel's past, and to set beside that charge one of the Bible's great pictures of God: utterly exalted, yet choosing to dwell with the humble.
- 57:1–2 — The righteous die and no one notices or asks why. The prophet says their death is, in its way, a mercy: they are taken away from the evil to come and enter peace.
- 57:3–10 — The accusation: 'children of a sorceress', gathering under green trees, pouring offerings to the smooth stones of the valley, making a bed on the high hills, even sacrificing children in the ravines. This is the old Canaanite hill-shrine religion the prophets had condemned for centuries, returning in the rebuilt community. The people are exhausted by it, yet they will not admit it is hopeless.
- 57:11–13 — God asks whom they feared so much that they lied and forgot him. Their collection of idols will be blown away by a breath. But whoever takes refuge in the LORD will inherit the land and his holy mountain.
- 57:14–21 — 'Build up, prepare the road!' The High and Exalted One speaks: he lives in eternity and also with the contrite and lowly, to revive them. He will not stay angry forever; he will heal, lead and comfort, offering 'peace, peace' to far and near. The wicked, though, are like a restless sea — for them there is no peace.
Key verse: Isaiah 57:15 · So what: The chapter will not let us picture God as either distant or tame. He is higher than anything we can imagine, and he chooses to live next to people who are broken and know it. The same passage that is severe about religion that uses and even sacrifices the vulnerable is tender toward anyone flattened by life. Both belong together: God's holiness is exactly what makes his nearness to the lowly good news.