Isaiah 59:3
For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness.
Iniquity shows itself in both deed and word, with hands and fingers defiled by bloody and wrongful acts and lips and tongue given to lying and muttered perverseness. The bloodstained hands point to deeds of violence, the iniquity-marked fingers to further wrongdoing, while the lying lips and perverse tongue point to false and corrupt speech.
The verse describes the present rebellious condition of the nation, a people that have forsaken and forgotten God, chosen other gods, and followed corrupt ways until God has turned from them. In that condition of calamity the people have trampled upon the law of God and broken His everlasting covenant. That breaking includes despising the Sabbath, for the covenant was given on condition of obedience and has been broken by continual transgression.
Bloodshed, wrongdoing, lies, and perverse speech make men guilty and leave them without divine favor, separating them from God. Yet His power to save and His ear to hear are not diminished. Its context portrays people rejecting justice and truth, and the call is to put away evil and learn to do good.
The verse belongs to Isaiah 59-62, which define the work of Christ. It stands in the setting of His coming to save people over whom Satan was exercising power, to work out purposes planned in the counsels of heaven, and to set things in right light after the vineyard had been worked by unrighteous scribes and Pharisees. It describes the character of the priests and rabbis who opposed Jesus as corrupt religious leaders whose false reasoning misled many who were convinced He was the Son of God. They perverted the very words of prophecy so as to sanction error, and kept the people from studying the word for themselves and seeing the harmony between written prophecy and His life.
The same guilt applies to false shepherds who keep saving truth from the people, despise God's law, and misuse their speech to speak against it. The verse is a prophecy of the state of the world just prior to the second coming of the Lord, when abounding iniquity shows men turning away from God and His righteous government and coming more and more under the sway of seducing spirits. Cited with the surrounding verses about separation from God and lack of justice, it warns that sin keeps people from taking hold of Christ, which applies to drinking and to enabling liquor sales as sinful acts with harmful consequences for which those who permit them are accountable to God.