NOTES for Isa 49:1-6
About his calling and prophetic ministry, the prophet speaks as of something God had planned even before his birth. No wonder that in Christian tradition this self-testimony of Isaiah took on a messianic sound: it was not hard to connect the prophet's words both with what Jesus Himself says about Himself and with what other prophets say about the Messiah, above all Isaiah of Jerusalem.
Here an important pattern of spiritual life is reflected. Spiritual life is a system of relationships linking a person with God and with other people. Such relationships form a kind of spiritual fabric within which a person lives spiritual life. It is a life that, like every life, changes the one who lives it. And it is always, in any case, a process directed by God. The only question is the extent of God's participation in that process.
To what extent does He enter a person's spiritual life, and to what extent does He direct it from outside? Here everything depends on the person himself. It is no accident that so much is said about the fact that a person, if he wants communion with God, must let God into his life. This is not an allegory, but a completely concrete truth of spiritual life. The whole question is whether God will direct our life from outside, touching it only as a force external to it, or whether our life will become part of His life. However shocking it may sound, this is exactly the kind of inclusion being discussed. Of course, God does not need our life in itself; He can get along perfectly well without us. But He loves us, and that is the whole point.
He understands that we are the ones who need His life. And He is ready to share it with us. But if we begin to live a shared life with God, it turns out that we become an inseparable part of something conceived and begun long before we appeared in the world. And the more God's element predominates in our shared life with Him, the more something beyond the human predominates in it. Something that cannot be contained entirely within the limits of human nature nevertheless joins itself to that nature and determines its existence.
This is how God enters a person and human life. No wonder that everything said here could be applied first of all to Christ: in Him this entry reached completion, fullness. But every person, insofar as he lets God into his life, also takes part in this process. As much as he can contain. And Isaiah, like every prophet, is no exception. He, like all the other prophets, only anticipates what will be revealed to the world in fullness in Christ.