The chapter spends fifteen verses establishing that the nations are a drop in a bucket and the stars are called by name — and then asks one exhausted man why he thinks God has lost track of him. The scale is not the point. It is the set-up.
A study in Isaiah 40 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
Table of Contents
Where The Book Turns
Chapter 39 ends badly. Hezekiah has shown the Babylonian envoys everything in his treasury, and Isaiah tells him what it will cost: your sons will be carried to Babylon. The king’s reply is one of the saddest lines in Scripture — good is the word of the LORD which thou hast spoken — because there shall be peace in my days.
That is where the first half of Isaiah stops: a captivity announced, a century out, and a king relieved it will not be his problem.
Then chapter 40 opens, and everything changes — the tone, the audience, the tense. The prophet is no longer warning a nation that disaster is coming. He is speaking to people who are already in it.
A note on a question you may meet. That shift is why some scholars propose a second author for chapters 40 to 66 — the setting moves to the exile, the voice softens, and Cyrus is named. It is a real observation and worth knowing about rather than being startled by. Two things stand against it: the New Testament quotes freely from both halves and attributes both to Isaiah, and the great Isaiah scroll found at Qumran — copied before Christ — runs straight from 39 to 40 with no seam, no gap, and no marker of any kind. A prophet who could see the Messiah seven centuries out could see an exile one century out.
Comfort Is An Order
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.”
Isaiah 40:1, 2
These are imperatives, and they are plural. God is not describing a mood; He is issuing an instruction, to somebody, about how His people are to be spoken to. The doubling — comfort ye, comfort ye — is Hebrew for insistence.
And notice the tense, because it is the whole gospel in a grammatical detail. The warfare is accomplished. The iniquity is pardoned. Not will be once you have suffered enough. This is announced to a people whose exile had not yet begun when the words were written — pardon in the past tense, delivered to people still walking toward the consequences of their sin.
Any comfort that has to be earned first is not comfort. It is terms.
All Flesh Is Grass
Then, immediately, the chapter refuses to be sentimental about it.
“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth… surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.”
Isaiah 40:6-8
This is a strange thing to say to people who need comforting, and it is why the comfort holds. Isaiah is not telling the exiles they are stronger than they think. He is telling them they are grass — and that the word spoken over them is not.
The consolation is located outside the person entirely. Everything about you fades, including the good parts — all the goodliness thereof. What does not fade is what God said. Peter picks this up and applies it directly to the gospel preached to us.
Behold Your God
“O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain… lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!”
Isaiah 40:9
The commission is two words long. Not explain your God, not defend your God, not improve people’s behavior. Behold your God — point at Him and get out of the way.
And the first thing shown, before any of the majesty, is this:
“He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.”
Isaiah 40:11
Gently lead those that are with young. A shepherd who paces the flock to whatever is slowest and most burdened in it. Hold that image, because the chapter is about to spend fifteen verses on a God who weighs mountains — and this is the same God, described first.
The Argument From Size
“Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?”
Isaiah 40:12
Every image is a measuring image, and every one is absurdly small: a cupped palm holding the oceans, a hand-span from thumb to little finger reaching across the heavens, mountains on a set of scales. The point is not that God is large. It is that the things we find overwhelming are, to Him, quantities you could check.
“Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance… All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.”
Isaiah 40:15, 17
Remember who is hearing this. Babylon was the superpower that had swallowed their country. A drop left in the bucket after you empty it. The dust on the scale pan that is too light to move the needle. That is a political statement as much as a theological one, and it was made to people living under the thing being dismissed.
Twice the chapter puts the question directly — “To whom then will ye liken God?” (verse 18) and again “To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One” (verse 25) — and between them sits a small, devastating passage about a man commissioning an idol and choosing wood that will not rot. The contrast is deliberate: on one side, someone who has to make sure his god does not fall over.
“Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might… not one faileth.”
Isaiah 40:26
He calls the stars by name. Not counts them — names them, which is what you do with things you know individually rather than manage in bulk. Remember that when the turn comes.
About The Circle Of The Earth
“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.”
Isaiah 40:22
This verse gets pressed into service as proof that Scripture taught a spherical earth long before science did, and it is worth being careful here rather than claiming more than the text will bear.
The Hebrew word is chug. It means a circle, a compassed thing, a vault — the shape you get by swinging a compass round. Hebrew has a separate word for a ball or sphere, and Isaiah did not use it here. So the verse does not straightforwardly say globe, and a reader who is told it does may feel misled when they find that out from someone less friendly.
What it does say is remarkable enough. God is seated above the whole compassed extent of the earth, and from that vantage its inhabitants are grasshoppers. The heavens are a curtain He stretches — the image is of something vast to us and trivially handled by Him. The verse is making a point about perspective, and it makes it perfectly whether or not it is describing geometry.
Scripture does not need us to overclaim on its behalf. It usually loses more from a strained argument than it would have gained.
And Then The Turn
Everything above has been building, and here is what it was building toward. After the oceans in a palm, the nations as dust, the stars called by name — the chapter turns and asks one question:
“Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God?”
Isaiah 40:27
That is the complaint the whole cosmic display was aimed at. Not God is not real and not God is not strong — but God has not noticed me. My case has slipped past Him. In an empire of that size, with a God of that scale, one exhausted person has been mislaid.
And the answer Isaiah gives is not you matter more than you think. It is: look again at the stars. The God who names every one of them individually is not a God who loses track of things. The size that felt like the problem is the proof.
He Giveth Power To The Faint
“Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?… He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.”
Isaiah 40:28, 29
Read those two sentences together and the logic is exact. He fainteth not — therefore He giveth power to the faint. His inexhaustibility is not a fact about Him held at a distance; it is the supply.
And the recipients are named without flattery: the faint, and them that have no might. Not the promising. Not the ones nearly there. This is addressed to people with nothing left, which is who the chapter has been speaking to since verse 1.
It is the same shape Ellen White finds in the prophet’s own call. He who dwells “in the high and holy place” dwells also “with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit” (Prophets and Kings, p. 314, quoting Isaiah 57:15). The height and the nearness are not in tension. In Isaiah they are the same doctrine.
Wings, Then Running, Then Walking
“Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Isaiah 40:30, 31
Notice first who fails: the youths. The chapter picks the strongest people available — those with the most natural resource — and says they will utterly fall. Whatever renews strength here, it is not a quality of the person.
Then the famous three, and they go in a strange order. Flying, running, walking. A poet building to a climax would reverse it — walk, then run, then soar. Isaiah descends.
They shall walk, and not faint.
Because that is the hardest of the three, and everyone who has been tired for a long time knows it. Almost anyone can soar for an hour. Running takes more. Walking without fainting is the endurance that ordinary life actually requires — the thirty years of it, the same duty on Tuesday as on Sunday, with no lift and no drama.
The chapter that began with pardon announced to people who had not yet earned it ends with strength promised to people who have none. Both come from outside. That is what comfort means in Isaiah, and it is why the word can be shouted at the exhausted without cruelty.
