Bible Commentaries
Isaiah 25

Verses 1-12

God Be Praised (25:1-12)

Verses 1-5 comprise a hymn of praise to God for his purpose to save the poor and the needy from “the blast of the ruthless.”

The context is a victory over an unspecified enemy and an unnamed city (vs. 2). It has been conjectured that this poem may have been drawn from an earlier victory hymn in which some great power was destroyed, though God had preserved his own people. Actually, however, the references are general, so that they become fitting praise of the Savior of the weak and the poor in any of the disasters of earth.

Verses 6-12 are a series of prose fragments. Verses 6-7 refer to the great Messianic banquet which will be held in the days to come for the whole people of the earth. At that time the Lord will have done away with the veil or covering that is spread over all the peoples of the earth so that they cannot really see and understand the meaning of history or of God’s sovereignty. Another beautiful presentation of this great banquet for all men in the age when all will have been reconciled to God is found in chapter 55. In the New Testament the presentation of the Lord’s Supper draws upon this theme, so that it becomes a banquet of the Kingdom preparatory to the banquet for all men which will be presided over by the Messiah.

In ancient Israel death was something to be dreaded because it removed one from life, where God was most active. It was only in the very late period between the Old and New Testaments that a few Jews began to express the certainty that even death would be conquered in the age to come. Here is a beautiful expression of this thought: Death itself and all sorrow and trouble will be taken away from the people of the earth (vs. 8). For this we can hope, for the Lord has decreed it.

Verse 9 expresses the meaning of it all: “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us.” The final verses 10-12 are a negative statement of the future of Moab quite different in tone from chapters 15-16, and probably deriving from the period after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 or 586 B.c., when the peoples across the Jordan had taken advantage of their afflicted neighbor and had raided and robbed.