Isaiah 9:5, commentary and pictures

Isaiah 9:5 belongs to Isaiah's prophecy of the given child who brings light to those in darkness and reigns as Prince of Peace, the Messiah. His kingdom is not won by ordinary warfare with its battle cries and bloodied garments, but through suffering, and his passage through the world is not unobstructed. The first half of the verse describes that ordinary human warfare, fought with confused noise and noisy turmoil and garments rolled in blood.

That long record of tumults, conflicts, and revolutions displays the terrible results of rejecting heaven's authority in centuries of crime and human misery. The destruction of Jerusalem was a faint shadow of that misery. Those past conflicts and desolations are light and only a faint comparison, small in contrast with a yet darker future scene of final destruction.

In that future day of terror God's restraining Spirit will be wholly withdrawn from the wicked and will no longer hold in check the outburst of human passion and satanic wrath, so the world will behold as never before the results of Satan's rule. In contrast to human battle, at the coming of Christ the clash of arms and tumult of battle is stilled and earthly strife ceases, so no war is heard but only the voice of prayer and the sound of weeping and lamentation. Then the wicked, who lately scoffed, face the King of kings and cry out in fear about the great day of wrath, praying to be buried beneath the rocks of the mountains rather than meet the face of him whom they despised and rejected.

The second half of the verse, with burning and fuel of fire, describes not ordinary battle but God's final judgment through consuming fire, the destruction of the wicked and Satan in the last struggle when justice is fully carried out. That burning comes as fire down from God out of heaven, the earth is broken up and the weapons concealed in its depths are drawn forth, devouring flames burst from every yawning chasm, the very rocks are on fire, the day burns as an oven, the elements melt with fervent heat, and the earth and the works in it are burned up until the surface is one molten mass, a vast seething lake of fire. This is the time of the judgment and perdition of ungodly men, the day of the Lord's vengeance and the year of recompenses for the controversy of Zion, when the wicked receive their recompense in the earth as stubble burned up, each punished according to his deeds.