NOTES for Isa 50:4-9

The resolve with which the prophet calls his opponents to God's judgment may look somewhat presumptuous to us today. We know well that there are no sinless people, and therefore at that Judgment we will all be among the accused, even if by earthly standards we were entirely right before our opponents. But the prophet does not necessarily have in mind the final Judgment, the one at which, at the end of time, each person's eternal destiny is determined.

In those days any intervention by God in events could be called God's judgment. And not only in those days: sometimes even today, though not often, we see the hand of God in the events of our own lives or in world history. This is the Judgment Isaiah is speaking about, and he is sure that at it he will be vindicated before his enemies. Such confidence may also have been connected with the obviousness of the situation: the passage is clearly speaking about persecutions, probably endured by Isaiah before the conquest of Babylon by the Persians. Faint echoes of some conflict between the last king of Babylonia and the Jewish community, as well as his conflict with the traditional priesthood, can be found both in Babylonian sources and in biblical books.

Yet the point was not merely the prophet's human rightness. His conflict with those who opposed him was not simply a clash between different people holding different positions. It was a conflict between a person doing God's work and those who opposed God's plans and wanted to destroy them. He needed God's judgment not to assert his own rightness and not for the sake of triumph over his enemies, but so that God's work would not stop, so that it would continue and come to success.

After all, God also does not need triumph for the sake of triumph, and He does not need to prove His rightness to anyone. What matters to Him is to carry out His plan for human salvation and to make our fallen world part of His Kingdom, transforming it and changing its very nature. Each of His servants becomes part of this plan, and therefore God does everything so that each of His servants will prosper in the mission entrusted to him. He does this also for the sake of those who see such a servant as their opponent: for God does not want anyone's destruction; He wants everyone, including the most terrible sinners, to turn, repent, and remain alive.