AP

Isaiah 63:16-17   But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.  Why, LORD, do you make us wander from your ways and harden our hearts so we do not revere you?  Return for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your inheritance.

The faithful Covenant-keeping God of Israel, the LORD, is giving his people, in their utterly desperate, helpless situation, the opportunity to cry out to him to do everything necessary to restore their fellowship wth him as his inheritance, the fellowship he had always intended for them.  They could see that, had they persisted with the faith of Abraham and the patient perseverene of Jacob (Israel), they would not have come to their present predicament: they had lost the faith/trust component of the DNA of their ancestors, and they were in desperate need of God’s taking the initiative, his sovereign intervention, like a loving Father would for his wayward son.
Isaiah’s confidence that God would act in this way as their ‘Redeemer from of old’ is strengthened by the fact that their ‘wandering’ and the ‘hardening of their hearts’ was in the LORD’s hands in the first place – not that God was to blame for their sinfulness (they were still culpable), but that all he had to do, for them to go astray, was to withdraw his restraining hand of mercy and leave them to their own sinful desires, and ‘wandering’ and ‘hardening’ would result.  The apostle Paul makes a similar point in Romans 1 with his expressions: “Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts (24) … God gave them over to shameful lusts (26) … God gave them over to a depraved mind (28) …”.
This is the only frame of mind in which we must all come to faith in Jesus, ‘our Redeemer from of old’ – to himalone as the only solution to our sin problem.  “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling; naked come to thee for dress, helpless look to thee for grace, foul, I to the fountain fly, wash me, Saviour, or I die.” (Toplady).  We come, demanding nothing, deserving nothing, capable of nothing, but only with thankful hearts that, in his great mercy, he has come to us and drawn us back.
– Bruce Christian