There is a lot going on in these middle chapters of the Book of Isaiah. Prior to them, the first 39 chapters deal with the immediate crisis of the Assyrian menace and the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. Now, this section addresses the kingdom of Judah as they cope with their own exile in Babylon, seeking to comfort them and fortify their hope of return. In the very first lines, God commands an unnamed plurality of agents to comfort the people and let them know that their sentence is fulfilled and their return from exile is being prepared through the instrumentality of an unlikely helper—Cyrus, King of Persia, who will defeat Babylon and make the return of the exiles possible.
In all of the movement and thematic weavings of these chapters, it can be easy to miss one of the most evocative subtexts with which the prophet-poet is playing. Before giving it away outright, let me line up a few of its traits.
The first is one I have already noted: God addresses a plural assembly of some kind, giving them commands to act on behalf of God’s people. “Comfort, ye” says the Lord, and “prepare ye the way” (Isaiah 40:1, 3).1 Since the text doesn’t tell us directly who is being given these commands, we have to infer, and one candidate scholars have favored relies on the similarity between this section and other places in the Hebrew Bible where God addresses a heavenly assembly. A notable example of this occurs earlier in the Book of Isaiah as God, enthroned, addresses an assemblage of Seraphim, and asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (Isaiah 6:1–8, and see a further example in 1 Kings 22:19–23 and 2 Chronicles 18:18–22). There are references to heavenly pluralities in the Psalms and Job, as well (e.g., Psalm 29:1; 82:1; 89:5–8; 103:20–21; 148:1–2; and Job 38:7); but it is in Genesis, most particularly, where the divine voice sometimes speaks from within a heavenly plurality of some kind, creating and ordering the world: “Let us make the human in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26); “The human is become as one of us” (Genesis 3:22); “Let us go down” (Genesis 11:7). Here, God speaks from within a heavenly council at the dawn of creation.
Another trait of the subtext is the notion of emptiness, vanity, or insignificance—all glosses of the pregnant Hebrew term tohu. The nations are “counted as nothing . . . and vanity” (Isaiah 40:17), princes are brought “to nothing” (Isaiah 40:23), idol-worshippers “are all vanity, their works are nothing” (Isaiah 41:29), idol-makers are “all of them vanity” (Isaiah 44:9). In Isaiah, the positive sense of countering this emptiness is also expressed when the prophet writes that God “created it not in vain [tohu]” and “said not . . . Seek ye me in vain [tohu]” (Isaiah 45:18–19). Significantly, this is the same term that is translated as “without form” to describe the world “in the beginning,” before God begins to create, in Genesis 1:2.
In another refrain from these chapters of Isaiah, God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain” (Isaiah 40:22), “created the heavens, and stretched them out . . . spread forth the earth” (Isaiah 42:5), “stretcheth forth the heavens . . . spreadeth abroad the earth” (Isaiah 44:24), and “stretched out the heavens” (Isaiah 45:12). This is the same language as we find in Psalm 104:2, 5, which famously invokes images of a God who “stretchest out the heavens as a curtain” and “laid the foundations of the earth,” much like the image of pitching a tent and setting down carpets for its floor.
Yet another motif, related to that of insignificance here, is that God “comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure” (Isaiah 40:12), the nations are as “small dust of the balance” (Isaiah 40:15), and Cyrus is given nations “as the dust to his sword” (Isaiah 41:2). These dusty images recall the formation of the human from the moistened dust of the ground in Genesis 2:6–7.
As I hope is becoming obvious, the subtextual theme that Isaiah is sounding throughout these chapters is that of creation—specifically, the sovereign and gracious power of God, who presides over a heavenly council, spreading out the heavens and the earth after finding the world empty and void, and then forming humans from the dust of the ground. And lest we suppose this is all coincidence, the language of creation continues to multiply in these chapters. The same words for creating or forming that occur in Genesis (bara/yatsar) recur throughout these chapters: “The Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel” (Isaiah 43:1); “I have created him for my glory, I have formed him” (Isaiah 43:7); “formed thee from the womb” (Isaiah 44:2, 24); “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). As Robert Alter translates Isaiah 45:11–12, “Thus said the LORD, Israel’s Holy One and its Fashioner . . . I made the earth and the humans upon it I created. It is I, My hands stretched out the heavens, and all their array I commanded.”2
These references to creation in Isaiah have a clear purpose: to highlight the ironic contrast between the true creation undertaken by the living God and the false creation undertaken by idol makers and idol worshipers. The ironsmith forges and hammers and works over his images (Isaiah 44:12), and the woodworker measures and marks, cuts and planes to fashion idols from material that is utterly subject to human craftsmanship. From the same tree that he takes firewood for dinner, notes Isaiah with obvious disgust, the carpenter makes an artificial deity. In these chapters of Isaiah, then, the contrasts between true and false creation are multiplied.
Where idols must be fashioned by humans, the true God is the fashioner of humans themselves. Where dumb idols must be “loaded as burdens on weary animals,” the creator God says the remnant of Israel “have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age I am he, even when you turn grey I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save” (Isaiah 46:1b–5). Where humans conserve and carry around the idols of their making to no purpose, God bears and saves humans with salvific purpose. Where idols afford no life or habitat to humans, God has made all from the dust of the earth and spread the heavens and the earth as a habitation for them. And where vain idols are crudely shaped in the fashioner’s likeness, humans are actually created in the supernal image of the divine.
The use of these echoes and reminders of the divine creation in these chapters of Isaiah, then, serves to heighten our awareness of the perversity of laboring to supplant the living God—who ordered and still upholds all things—with empty, vain, and impotent mirages of our own devising. To fashion idols is to turn the act of creation against itself, thwarting the sacred purpose for which humans were formed by God from the dust of the earth in the first place.
Often, in our considerations of the persistent struggle with idolatry that is chronicled in the Old Testament, we note that while Israel was enamored of false deities, we today have different temptations to idolatry. Rather than images of supposed gods, we are tempted by status, wealth, and leisure. It is good to reflect in this way, for it is all too true of us that such temptations abound. But more than just passively falling into vain and profitless cultural patterns, are there ways that we actively participate in their creation?
This has been a challenging question for me to ponder. The act of creation in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we are encouraged to become more like our heavenly parents by learning to create as they create. But might there be a dark side to creation, as well? There are probably as many answers to this question as there are readers willing to ponder it. As I have done so, I’ve reflected on the stories and metaphors that I have adopted, and sometimes, indeed, created, to make sense of myself to myself and to others. If I am very honest, I have to admit that some of these stories serve less to deepen understanding and more to cover my sins and to gratify my pride, and my vain ambition (see Doctrine and Covenants 121:37).
In today’s degraded cultural, political, and spiritual moment, abundant with those who “loveth and maketh a lie” (Revelation 22:15), it can be painful and sobering to examine the ways that we, too, participate in that lie-telling and idol-making. We curate an image of ourselves on social media or at church that we know in our hearts is a facade. We ascribe noble intentions to our support of flawed candidates while condemning the moral defects of those who vote differently. Someone who loves us asks how we’re doing, and we give a shallow “fine” or “great” instead of something closer to reality that might invite a courageous conversation. We naturally want to be the heroes of our own stories, so it takes a determined kind of love of truth to allow the deep introspection that reveals ourselves as we truly are before divine reality.
But in the depths of such humbling visions, Isaiah goes on to surprise and assure Zion—and by extension, us—that if we are willing to have our vain and fruitless self-deceptions uncovered to him, the Lord says, “I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions” (Isaiah 43:25); “I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions” (Isaiah 44:22). And then comes the most potent promise of all:
Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. (Isaiah 49:15–16)
As the vanity of the graven images we have made of and for ourselves is exposed, we find that our Creator has been making inscriptions of his own, indelible reminders of us within his own fashioning hands. We realize that he bears us not as a load that can be externalized to a beast of burden, but as a plan traced upon his own body. We are the marks in the palms of his hands of which he seeks no erasure. We are the confines—the “walls”—of relation from which he desires no escape. He is with us and for us always, unforgetting and unrelenting, until we tire of all our illusions and self-justifications, throw them down at last like so many idols, and step again into his living, loving embrace.
