NOTES for Isa 40:1
What can comfort persecuted people, who lost and their country and their saints? The promise for a new life, in which everything will still be as before? Perhaps. But such promise will hardly delight a spiritually mature person: indeed, it is impossible for such person not to understand that, if the new life is the same as was the former life, it will then also end so disastrously, as ended the former life.
Such a person can please not the return unto the past, no matter how much this past may seem happy from far, but an onward movement, which is unthinkable without spiritual renewal. It is not accidentally if the main comfort of the people turns out to be the news that their committed sin is forgiven, and its consequences are redeemed, such that now before them opens the possibility of a new life on the land of the ancestors, on which they can now return.
Before, the return on this land would have become the return to the past; now it will become a step to the future, to the future, where there will be many spiritual discoveries and revelations, to the messianic future, about which had already spoken the prophets before the period of captivity.
Without spiritual renewal the return in Judea would have been an undeserved reward, not bringing either joy, or benefits. After the renewal the return became the crown, which found his winner and the beginning of a new history of the people, who after the historic disaster that reached them, seemed to be condemned to disappearance and oblivion.