- Isaiah 66 BSB ↗
A mother sits with a child who has fallen and scraped both knees. She does not lecture or explain; she holds the child until the crying stops. Isaiah's final chapter reaches for that picture when it describes God: 'As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.' It is one of the tenderest lines in the whole book. Yet the chapter also contains some of Isaiah's sternest words, and it closes the book on a verse so grim that, in synagogue reading, the verse before it is traditionally read again so the reading does not end there. Isaiah ends by holding comfort and warning side by side.
Where it sits in the story: In Act 3, the sixty-six chapters of Isaiah close. The ending deliberately echoes the beginning: chapter 1 called heaven and earth to witness and condemned sacrifices without justice and worship in gardens, and chapter 66 returns to all three before opening onto 'new heavens and a new earth'. Stephen quotes 66:1–2 in Acts 7, Jesus uses 66:24 for Gehenna (Mark 9:48), and the nations' ingathering points toward Revelation 21.
What this chapter is doing: To close Isaiah by redefining where God dwells and whom he honours — the humble who tremble at his word — and by drawing its great themes together: comfort for Zion, judgement on rebellion, and all nations gathered to worship.
- 66:1–4 — Heaven is God's throne and earth his footstool: what house could anyone build for him? He looks instead to the humble and contrite who tremble at his word. Sacrifice offered by people who choose their own ways is no better to him than murder or idolatry.
- 66:5–14 — Those who tremble at his word have been rejected by their own relatives, who mock, 'Let the LORD be glorified.' But Zion gives birth before labour pains; a nation is born in a moment. Jerusalem is like a mother who nurses her children, and God says, 'As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.'
- 66:15–17 — The LORD comes in fire and whirlwind to judge all people. Those who purify themselves for rites in the gardens and eat pork, vermin and mice — practices of that ancient setting — will come to an end together.
- 66:18–23 — God will gather all nations and languages to see his glory. He will send survivors to distant lands — Tarshish, Put, Lud, Tubal, Javan and far coastlands — to declare his glory, and they will bring Israel's scattered relatives home as an offering. Some will even be taken as priests and Levites. As the new heavens and new earth endure, all flesh will come to worship each Sabbath.
- 66:24 — The book's last verse: worshippers go out and see the corpses of those who rebelled, whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched. Isaiah ends here, with the warning left standing beside the hope.
Key verse: Isaiah 66:13 · So what: Isaiah will not end on a single note, and perhaps that is honest. It closes with God as a comforting mother and as a consuming fire, with foreigners made priests and rebels left outside. Any reading that keeps only the comfort or only the warning flattens the book. What it values most is clear, though: not the size of the temple, but a humble person who trembles at God's word.