On Isaiah 40, and the God who does not grow tired of us

You know the silence I mean.

You have prayed the same prayer so many nights that the words have worn smooth, like a coin handled too long. You have asked, and asked, and the ceiling has not moved. Months of it. Maybe years. And somewhere underneath the prayer a quieter sentence starts to form, one you would never say out loud in church: He isn’t listening. My case has been set aside.

That is where Isaiah 40 begins. Not in triumph. In exile.

Israel is far from home. Babylon has taken the temple treasures, taken the sons, taken the future. Isaiah had seen it coming a chapter earlier and said it plainly — the days are coming when everything in your house will be carried off, and nothing will be left. It happened. And now the people sit in a foreign city, under foreign gods, and the God who had called them mine has, as far as they can feel, gone quiet.

I want to stay on Babylon for a second, because Babylon was never only a place.

In Scripture, Babylon becomes shorthand for everything in the world that is impressive to the eye and set against God underneath. Gleaming on the outside. Rotten at the root. And here is the part that makes my heart go small: you can be carried into Babylon without ever noticing the journey. You can take on its values, its doctrines, its whole way of wanting things, and call it home. I look at the world I live in — I look at this country I love — and I see how much of it is exactly that. Confident. Beautiful. Quietly opposed to God. And most of the people inside it have no idea they’ve been taken.

So this is who the word of comfort comes to. Not the strong. The captured. The tired.

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.

Notice that He still says my people. After the exile. After the failure. Still mine.

And then Isaiah does something strange. To a people who feel forgotten, he preaches the sheer size of God. Who measured the oceans in the cup of his hand? Who has ever taught the Lord anything, shown Him a better way? The nations are one drop hanging off a bucket. Dust on a scale. He sits above the circle of the earth, and from up there we look like grasshoppers — all of us, the whole restless swarm of us. He brings out the stars one by one and calls each of the billions by name, and not one of them goes missing.

You would think that would only make a small, tired person feel smaller.

But watch where Isaiah is going. Right after the stars — right after establishing that God forgets nothing, not one distant burning thing in all that dark — he turns and looks straight at the exhausted heart and says back to it exactly what it has been whispering:

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?

There it is. The real thing. Not does God exist — the exiles believed He existed. The wound is quieter than that, and closer to the bone. My case, mine specifically, has been overlooked. He is real, and He is powerful, and He is not paying attention to me.

And I love that God does not scold the doubt. He answers it.

Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary.

Read that slowly if you are tired tonight. He does not grow weary. The One who has been waiting with you does not get drowsy on the late shift. He does not lose the thread of your prayer somewhere around month eight. And his understanding is unsearchable — which means that if the answer is taking longer than you can bear, it is not because He forgot. It is because He is working at a depth you cannot see the bottom of.

Then comes the promise, and it is not the promise I would have written.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Not the strong will win. The strong fall down. The young burn out. The promise is for the ones who have run all the way out of themselves and are still, somehow, waiting. The NIV says those who hope in the Lord — and it turns out hoping and waiting are the same verb, the same act, the same stubborn refusal to stop looking up.

Here is the whole thing, as plainly as I can say it. I don’t think most Christians doubt that God is mighty. We’ll sing that all day long. He hangs the stars and calls them by name — fine, we believe it. What we doubt, at two in the morning, is whether that God will bother to help us. This situation. This prayer. The one we’ve held up so long our arms have gone numb.

That is the exact doubt God reaches for in verse 27. And His answer is not you were wrong to hurt. His answer is: I am not hidden. I am not disregarding you. Wait.

So tonight, wait.

But hear the tense of the promise, because everything turns on it.

They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

Shall. Will. Later. The soaring is in the future, and the future can be years away — years of kneeling, years of the same worn prayer. The renewed strength is a promise still out ahead of you.

And yet look back at where the chapter opened, because that is the present tense. Comfort, comfort my people. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem. Tell her that her hard service is completed, that her sin is paid for. Not will be. Is. Already. The exiles were still sitting in Babylon when God announced that their warfare was over. You may still be on your knees when He says the hard part of your waiting is finished. The soaring is coming. The comfort has already started.

That is how grace works while you wait. He gives power to the faint, and strength to the one who has none left — not by lifting the weakness off you, but by quietly rebuilding you underneath it, for a day you cannot yet see.

And that day comes. There is no image in all of Scripture more liberating for someone who has knelt so long their knees have gone numb than this one. Not crawling. Not limping. Not merely surviving. An eagle — thousands of feet up, wings open, riding the very wind that used to knock you flat. The God who never grows weary does not just get you back on your feet. He gives you the sky.

So keep waiting. The kneeling is not the last scene. Out ahead of you, above Babylon and the grasshoppers and the numbered stars, something with wide wings is riding the high wind — weightless, unhurried, unafraid. Not long ago it was face-down on the floor, praying a prayer that seemed to land nowhere. That is you, later. Wait for it.