Isaiah 40 is the proclamation of good news. God is giving words of comfort to his people so that they will stand on high mountains proclaiming, “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9). Then Isaiah pictures the immense power and majesty of God. Isaiah 40 is to help us have the right lens of the Lord when we look to him. How we look at the Lord will affect how we live. So Isaiah is giving a clear picture of the Lord. The Lord comes with power who will gather his sheep into his arms and gently lead them (Isaiah 40:10-11). Then Isaiah overwhelms us with enormity and immensity of God. Who can you compare our God to? Who is like him? He measures the waters of the earth in the hollow of his hand. He measures off the heavens with the span of his hand. He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth and people are like grasshoppers beneath him. He stretches out the heavens like a canopy. He blows and human leaders are brought to nothing. He brings out the stars one by one, calls them by name, and not one of them is missing. The nations are like a drop in the bucket to him. They are emptiness before him. No one informs him and does not need counsel from anyone. The immensity of God is to cause us to draw a single conclusion that is asked as two rhetorical questions in verse 27. Why do you say that your way is hidden from the Lord? Why do you think that your cause is disregarded by God? Now what conclusions are we supposed to draw now that we are seeing our Lord in the way that he wants us to see him?
The Lord Is the Everlasting God (Isaiah 40:28)
Isaiah tells the people something that he knows that they know. But they need to let this information sink deeply into their minds and hearts. The Lord is the everlasting God. He is the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. God does not get tired. We get tired. Every day at some point we get tired. After a lot of activity or having a long day we are tired. Not only do we get tired, but we also get weary. Life can be wearisome. When we studied Ecclesiastes you might remember how the author speaks about the weariness of life. Another day comes and another day goes. A generation comes and a generation goes. The sun rises and the sun goes down. The streams run to the sea but the sea is never full. “All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing” (Ecclesiastes 1:8 ESV). Life is just exhausting to us. Hardships wear us down. The monotony and repetition of life wear us down. The emptiness wears us down. We get tired and we become weary with life.
But the Lord is the everlasting God. He does not faint and he does not grow weary. He is not tired. He is not in need of rest. God does not need to sleep. God does not wear down. God is not weak and he is not tired so that he cannot act. Isaiah is going to talk more about this in a moment. But before he does, he wants to underscore a key attribute about God at the end of verse 28. There is no limit to God’s wisdom and understanding. No one can grasp his understanding. His comprehension is unsearchable. No one can measure the depths of his understanding. All of us have limits to our understanding. We can think that we know a lot. We can think that we have great wisdom and maybe we do. But there is a limit. There is only so much we know. There is only so much we can understand. God has revealed much for us to understand so that we can obey him. But there is more that we cannot understand (cf. Deuteronomy 29:29). His understanding is infinite and ours is limited.
Therefore, God knows what to do. God knows what he is doing. God knows what his people need. God knows how to respond and when to respond. We struggle with this. We often do not know what to do. We often do not know what people need. Even when we think we know what someone needs we can be wrong. We often do not know how to respond and when to respond. But God does not struggle with these issues. He knows what we need and when we need it. God is not tired or weary to do what needs to be done.
The Lord Gives Strength to the Weary (Isaiah 40:29-30)
Notice what Isaiah wants us to understand in verse 29. The Lord gives strength to the weary. The Lord strengthens the powerless. I love that Isaiah does not say that God gives strength to the strong. I love that Isaiah does not say that God strengthens the powerful. No, God gives strength to the weary. God takes the powerless and gives them the strength that they need. When does God do this? Isaiah does not answer this yet. He will answer this question in a moment. But Isaiah needs to move us another direction first. Look at verse 30.
In verse 30 we are taught that even the young will get tired and lose strength. This is the problem of depending on yourself. No matter how strong you are, you will fail. No matter how strong you are, you will be disappointed. No matter how strong you are, you will get weary. Your strength only goes so far. Your strength can only sustain you for so long. We need to look at our trials and severity that we experience and understand that God must show us that our strength will break. We even talk about our trials and suffering in this way. We will say to each other, “I am at my breaking point.” This is the point of Isaiah 40:30. Everyone has a breaking point. No one is strong enough for life. Every person will grow faint and become weary. When we depend on ourselves then we will say such words like, “I am at my breaking point” or “I can’t do this anymore.” Sometimes we think we are failures because we think we are not strong enough. But God is confirming that no one is strong enough. You are not supposed to be strong enough. God has made life so that each one of us will grow weary and faint. There is no scripture that tells you to go stand on your own strength. There is no scripture that you says you need to be strong in yourself and depend on you to get through life. But there are many scriptures that tell us to find our strength in the Lord and to stand in him because he gives strength to the weary. When we are commanded to put on the whole armor of God, the picture was not to take the armor to fight for yourself and by yourself. Rather, the armor of God is how we are strong in the Lord and stand in the strength of his might.
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. (Ephesians 6:10-11 ESV)
So our failure to stand on our own is to be expected. Even the youths will faint and the young men will stumble and fall (Isaiah 40:30). The point is that even the people that you would visualize to be the strongest and have the greatest amount of endurance will not and cannot last on their own strength. So back to the question we asked earlier because now it is about to be answered. When does God give strength to the weary and strengthen the powerless?
Wait For the Lord (Isaiah 40:31)
Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength. This is a great image for us. The people who wait for God will have their strength renewed. So a contrast is being given to us. If we are relying on our own strength in this life, eventually you will grow tired and weary, stumble and fall. But those who are waiting on the Lord will have a different outcome. Rather than being tired to the point of stumbling and falling, they will have their strength renewed such that they will rise up like an eagle. It is a really vivid contrast. It is a contrast of outcomes and a contrast of dependence. If you depend on yourself, you will be weary and fall. If you wait and hope for God, you will get your strength renewed and soar over the obstacles.
Now listen to the reversal picture in the rest of verse 31. Those who wait for the Lord will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not faint. This reminds me of an image that God used for Jeremiah who was struggling with his God-given mission. God told him that if he was unable to run with people, what would he do when he had to run with horses (cf. Jeremiah 12)? The picture is that we are all going to have run the race of life. But those who are looking for God are going to run and not give out. The writer of Hebrews instructs us that we need to run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus (cf. Hebrews 12:1-2). How can we have the endurance we need? The endurance does not come from ourselves but in wait for and looking to the Lord. The apostle Paul also described the course of life as running a race. He told the Corinthians that you cannot run aimlessly but run in such a way to receive the prize (cf. 1 Corinthians 9:24-26).
So let’s get to the heart of this instruction. What does it mean to wait for the Lord? Some translations read to hope for the Lord. What we are doing is waiting for God’s answer. We are waiting for God to turn the event. We are waiting for God to reverse the circumstances. We are waiting for God to open a new door. We are waiting for God to break the light into the darkness. There are so many examples of the people of faith showing us what it looks like to wait for the Lord and put your hope in him. One of my favorite examples that we have recently looked at in our study is Joseph, Jacob’s son. Joseph had to wait 13 years for his life to turn. Everything went wrong in Joseph’s life and none of it was because of actions he had taken. But he continued to serve the Lord. Continuing to walk by faith is how we hope in God and wait for him. So Joseph kept doing what was right until one day the turn came in his life and God lifted from the pit and into Pharaoh’s administration.
One of the hardest things we must do in trials and in life is to wait for and hope in God through the circumstances we face. But God has expressed to us how we can wait for him. First, if we trust in ourselves and depend on ourselves we will grow faint and stumble. We have to wait for God because failing to do so leaves us crushed. Second, we can wait for the Lord because of who he is. Go back to verse 28. The Lord is the everlasting God. He does not grow faint or weary. There is no limit to his understanding. Do you remember the point we made there? God knows what to do and when to do it. God knows what is needed in the moment. He knows what we need and when we need it. God does not struggle with what he needs to do next with our lives. God knows what the next puzzle piece is in our lives, where it fits, and how to move it into place.
Hope For The Weary
Let us conclude this lesson with some critical personal evaluation. If I feel weary to the point of giving up on God, then this is a strong indication that I am trusting on myself rather than hoping in the Lord. This is important for us to think about because God is making a promise in verse 31. God will give the necessary strength needed for those who are looking to him in hope rather than themselves. Moses made the same point to the people of Israel when he described why they needed to go through the wilderness before entering the promised land.
And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:2-3 ESV)
Moses says that what God is doing through our time in the wilderness is revealing what is in our heart to see if we will obey him when life is hard. Further, God is showing us that we live by trusting in God and not in ourselves. This is the message of Isaiah 40. The good news is that God gathers his sheep into his arms and uses his knowledge and mighty power to help and rescue his people. The question is if we will wait for him. The question is if we will hope in him. Or will we stop obeying the Lord and doing what is right because life has become too hard and too overwhelming. We hope in God by remaining faithful through our difficulties. We wait for the Lord by knowing that he will give us the strength we need at the right time and in the way we need for our faith. God will give us the strength to soar if we will look to him when we are weary rather than continuing to run in life without God.