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Isaiah 52:1-2 Awake, awake, Zion, clothe yourself with strength!  Put on your garments of splendour, Jerusalem, the holy city.  The uncircumcised and defiled will not enter you again.  Shake off your dust; rise up, sit enthroned, Jerusalem.  Free yourself from the chains on your neck, Daughter Zion, now a captive.

It is very encouraging (and challenging) for us today to come across a gem like this in God’s Inspired Word!

The Prophet Isaiah was addressing a situation in the life of God’s Covenant People, Israel, that seemed absolutely hopeless.  In these chapters, Isaiah is acknowledging all the difficulties and disasters in their historical setting – things that would understandably cause them to doubt God’s Covenant faithfulness and providential care big-time, so he is calling them to wake up and look at their Sovereign Protector’s ‘Big Picture’, where they will see a quite different take on what was happening, both around them and among them.

Instead of being downcast and gloomy, wearing the sackcloth and ashes of a defeated people, they were to ‘put on … garments of splendour’ and be seated on a throne, as conquerors and rulers in God’s presence, rather than ‘enchained’ prisoners!  In the very next chapter (53) he will give a mind-blowing description of how God’s final victory will be achieved: through his sending of his special Servant – One who has “no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (53:2b), who is “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (53:3a), who will “[take] up our pain and [bear] our suffering” and we will “consider[ed] him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted” because “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities” and “the punishment that brought ud peace was on him, and by hid wounds we are healed.  We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (53:4).

Incredible!  Amazing love and grace!  God’s Covenant People today, his Church, have the advantage of being able to look back on the outworking of God’s Big Picture in the life, death, resurrection and ascension to power of the Lord Jesus Christ – so how much more loudly the call comes to us, in the difficult, confusing and perplexing circumstances in which we find ourselves, to wake up, wake up, to not be discouraged or downcast as if we are ‘prisoners chained’ to these circumstances, but to ‘put on garments of splendour’ and praise.

Jesus himself will expound in the synagogue, and fulfil in his ministry, the substance of what Isaiah will later write: “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion – to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.  They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the LORD for the display of his splendour.” (Isaiah 61:1-3; see Luke 4:18-19).  Such positive faith and jubilant praise is what will have the most impact on our hostile and disparaging culture today.  Let us wake up!

– Bruce Christian