Isaiah 42:15, commentary and pictures

The Lord declares that He will lay waste mountains and hills, dry up all their vegetation, turn rivers into islands, that is dry land, and dry up the pools. This is what He does after long holding His peace and refraining Himself, when He goes forth as a man of war, a mighty man of war, to prevail against His enemies. In going forth He stirs up jealousy, cries and roars like a travailing woman, and destroys and devours at once.

This wasting of mountains and hills and drying of herbs, rivers, and pools belongs to the new things God declares beforehand. In that same declared work Christ as God's chosen Servant, upheld by God, brings judgment to the Gentiles and brings forth judgment unto truth until He sets judgment in the earth. He does this without self-exaltation, without crying in the street, without breaking the bruised reed or quenching the smoking flax.

In the same work God gives His Servant for a covenant and a light of the Gentiles to open blind eyes and to bring prisoners from darkness, from the prison house of unbelief. He leads the blind by a way they knew not and by unknown ways, making darkness light before them and crooked things straight without forsaking them. Those trusting idols and molten images are turned back in great shame, and He magnifies the law to make it honorable.

The verse thus displays the Lord's decisive power to overcome obstacles and transform the land as part of His deliverance of His people. It belongs to His promises and assurance that will surely be fulfilled. It shows that the set time to favor Zion will soon come, when God will accomplish His work just as He ordained it to move, having provided men and means for it and refusing to leave His people to shame.

It is a source of encouragement amid the judgments of God in the land and the judgments and calamities coming upon the world. That encouragement extends to missionary work in remote and difficult places, for Isaiah 42:12-16 is given for such work. It plainly foretells the present great and solemn work of presenting the testing warning message to the world. That work gives the world the reason for present belief and uses camp meetings as the opportunity to give people the information they desire.

That testing message is given through anyone the Lord selects and appoints as My servant, Israel, the servant of the Lord, even out of the usual order. It comes by startling messages that arouse people dead in trespasses and sins, warn them, open blind eyes, and bring prisoners from unbelief. Together with Isaiah 40, the whole of Isaiah 42, and Second Peter, the verse is to be diligently studied as revealing God's purpose for His people. Together they teach the deeply spiritual, reformatory nature of the work to be carried forward.

The study calls for hearts prepared to receive His messages and for seeking wisdom from Him and not from finite human beings. It calls for holding firmly to the Word of God as the true science of redeeming grace treasured above gold and silver against confusing human science and false science. It calls for men of clear understanding worked by the Holy Spirit to lead out in thorough reformation with no haphazard work and no needless display.

The work advances in Christ's humble lines, not with outward observation but by the gentleness of the inspiration of His word and by the operation of His Spirit in the soul. It is to be presented before the world in distinct, holy, sacred lines in which covenant with Christ joins the majesty of an omnipotent King with the gentleness and tenderness of a caretaking shepherd, that men may understand the claims God has upon them. The whole prophecy is to be brought to bear on human hearts, especially the sick, so that many are turned to the Lord in confidence, for He is truth personified.

The verse also means that God will judge anyone who interposes between fellow men and God to lead them into paths not cast up for the ransomed. His work in many places of the world would now be much farther advanced had man not so interposed to do a work God did not appoint.