Biblion Bible Commentary
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Until the Cities Are Waste
Isaiah 6:9-13
9 He said, “Go, and tell this people, ‘You hear indeed, but don’t understand. You see indeed, but don’t perceive.’ · WEB
The commission a man volunteered for turns out to be preaching that will not work, and it is quoted six times in the New Testament.
Go, and tell this people, "You hear indeed, but don't understand. You see indeed, but don't perceive" Isaiah 6:9.
The volunteer of the previous verse is told what he has signed up for, and it is failure.
Make the heart of this people fat. Make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed Isaiah 6:10.
The hardest commission in Scripture, and it is quoted in the New Testament more than any other Old Testament passage of comparable length — by Jesus explaining why he taught in parables Matthew 13:14–15, by John accounting for the unbelief that met him John 12:40, and by Paul in the last recorded scene of Acts Acts 28:26–27.
The grammar is what troubles readers. Isaiah is told to make the heart fat, as though the hardening were his assignment. Two things in the text bear on it, and neither dissolves the difficulty.
The first is that Scripture states the same event three ways. Here the prophet hardens; at Acts 28:27 the people's own heart has grown callous and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, with the verbs given to them; and the exodus narrative alternates in the same manner between Pharaoh hardening himself and God hardening him. The ordering there was decisive — five plagues of self-hardening before God's hand is named — and the same account is what this book assumes.
The second is the effect described. Preaching that is refused does not leave a person where it found them. A word heard and rejected makes the next word harder to hear, and the prophet's faithful speaking is the instrument of that. He is told the outcome in advance so that he will not measure the work by it.
And the purpose clause at the end — lest they... turn again, and be healed — is the sentence the New Testament writers keep returning to, because in every case they quote it while still preaching.
Then I said, "Lord, how long?" Isaiah 6:11.
The only thing he asks. Not why, and not to be released.
Until cities are waste without inhabitant, houses without man, the land becomes utterly waste Isaiah 6:11.
The answer is worse than the question anticipated, and it is the exile.
If there is a tenth left in it, that also will in turn be consumed, as a terebinth, and as an oak whose stump remains when they are cut down, so the holy seed is its stump Isaiah 6:13.
The last clause is the chapter's one mercy and it is easy to miss. A tenth survives and is burned again — and what is left after that is a stump, which in this book is never the end of anything. Five chapters later a shoot comes out of exactly such a stump Isaiah 11:1.
held with reason What this mark means