The return of God's people to the land of their fathers, the gathering of the people, is one of the central themes of Isaiah's preaching...
The return of God's people to the land of their fathers, the gathering of the people, is one of the central themes of the preaching of Isaiah of Babylon. There is nothing surprising in this: Isaiah of Babylon lived at the end of the period of exile, shortly before the conquest of Babylonia by Cyrus the Great, who issued the decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the city and the Temple. But for the prophet, the people's return from exile is more than the restoration of historical justice. Above all, it is a sign that God has forgiven the people all the sins they have committed, a sign of the restoration of the alliance they had broken in the period before the exile, bringing themselves and their country to national catastrophe.
The people's return to the land of their fathers was not simply a restoration of the former state of affairs, even in an improved form. It was not a return to the past, however spiritually ennobled, but a step into the future, into a new era which is, of course, connected with the former one, yet does not repeat it in any form, even a modified and, so to speak, optimised form. This is why Isaiah's preaching about the return so strongly recalls his own and his predecessors' prophecies about the messianic Kingdom, about the earth being transformed by the power of God's breath.
It is not only that the prophetic vision of the history of God's people envisaged the coming of the Messiah as the next spiritual milestone after the end of the time of trials—and all the prophets understood the exile precisely as a time of trials. It is also that, when events take place with God's direct involvement, when they are, as theologians say, providential, His involvement in those events always reveals His presence where they take place. Then the world, at least insofar as it is drawn into these providential events, becomes the Kingdom.
For the Kingdom of God is not some other, special world, or some different, transcendent dimension of our world. It is this same world of ours, so familiar to us, but changed by God's breath and wholly permeated by the radiance of His presence. As soon as this breath, these glimmers of His presence, become manifest, the world becomes different: not merely spacious and radiant, but, most importantly, obedient to God, ready to accept His every decree and every action upon it. It becomes what God intended it to be, and what it will become again after the Saviour's return in glory and the transfiguration whose reflections Isaiah saw.
49 Christ, being sent to the Jews complains of them, Isa 49:1-4.
He is sent to the Gentiles with gracious promises, Isa 49:5-12.
God's love to his church perpetual, Isa 49:13-17.
The ample restoration of the church, and its enlargement, Isa 49:18-23.
Its powerful deliverance out of captivity, Isa 49:24-26.