Two chapters that could not be less alike, set deliberately side by side: a land turned to burning pitch whose smoke goes up for ever, and a desert breaking into flower with a road through it that fools cannot get lost on. The first chapter also settles, by simple observation, what the Bible means by “for ever” when it talks about burning.
A study in Isaiah 34-35 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 17 min read
Come Near, Ye Nations
“Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it. For the indignation of the LORD is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies”
Isaiah 34:1, 2
The individual burdens are over. Isaiah has finished going nation by nation, and chapter 34 summons all of them at once.
Notice how the audience widens in a single verse. First ye nations. Then ye people. Then the earth, and all that is therein. Then the world, and all things that come forth of it. By the end of the sentence the court includes everything that has ever come out of the ground.
And what follows is deliberately hard to read. Carcasses, stink, mountains melting with blood. Isaiah is not being sensational; he is refusing the sanitised version. He has spent eleven chapters showing what nations do to each other, and this is what the accumulated result looks like when it is finally dealt with rather than described.
The Heavens Rolled Together As A Scroll
“And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree.”
Isaiah 34:4
One of the great images of Scripture, and John takes it up almost word for word at the sixth seal: “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places” (Revelation 6:14).
The picture is of a scroll being wound up. A scroll open on a table is how you read something; a scroll rolled shut is a document that is finished with. The sky, which Psalm 19 says has been telling the glory of God without a break since the beginning, is closed like a book at the end of the reading.
And then the comparison drops from cosmic to domestic in half a verse: the host of heaven falls as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig tree. Stars coming down like leaves in autumn — not violently, not with resistance. A leaf does not fight the vine. It simply lets go when the season is over.
The Controversy Of Zion
“For it is the day of the LORD’s vengeance, and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion.”
Isaiah 34:8
The chapter is aimed at Edom, and the reason is given in one phrase: the controversy of Zion.
A controversy is a case — a dispute with two sides and something to be settled. Edom was Esau’s nation, Jacob’s brother’s people, and the quarrel between those two households ran the whole length of the Old Testament. Edom refused Israel passage out of the wilderness; Edom stood at the crossroads and cut down the fugitives when Jerusalem fell. Obadiah’s entire book is about it.
And a case has a resolution. This is not God losing His temper with a small nation; it is a matter finally coming to judgment after centuries on the docket. Isaiah calls the timing the year of recompences — a settlement date, entered in a book.
Which is worth keeping in view when this language turns up in Revelation, as it does. The great controversy is not a metaphor borrowed from somewhere; the word is here, in Isaiah, describing a real dispute between real parties that is going to be heard.
The Smoke Thereof Shall Go Up For Ever
“And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever.”
Isaiah 34:9, 10
Stop here, because this passage does something no argument could do half as well.
Read the vocabulary. Brimstone. Burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day. The smoke thereof shall go up for ever. For ever and ever. If those phrases were read aloud with no reference given, almost every listener would say they were about hell.
They are about Edom. A stretch of territory south of the Dead Sea, in what is now southern Jordan.
And that is the whole point, because Edom is not on fire. There is no smoke rising from it today and there has not been for a very long time. Nobody has ever suggested there is. The prophecy was fulfilled — Edom was destroyed, comprehensively and permanently, and the ruins are still there — and the fire that was not quenched and whose smoke went up for ever went out.
So the Bible has now shown us, in a case we can check, exactly what it means by this language. Unquenchable means nobody put it out, not that it never stopped burning. The smoke goes up for ever means the destruction is permanent, not that the burning is endless. The result lasts for ever; the fire does not.
This matters directly, because John reuses these exact phrases at the end of Revelation — “the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever” (Revelation 14:11), and of Babylon, “her smoke rose up for ever and ever” (Revelation 19:3). He is quoting Isaiah 34. And a phrase means in Revelation what it meant in the book Revelation took it from.
None of this makes the judgment less real or less final. Edom is a very serious warning precisely because it is so complete — the land was ruined and stayed ruined, and none shall pass through it for ever and ever. That is the point being made about the wicked, and it is a terrible one. What the passage rules out is not the severity. It is the idea of a fire that never finishes its work.
Seek Ye Out Of The Book Of The LORD
“Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read: no one of these shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded, and his spirit it hath gathered them.”
Isaiah 34:16
In the middle of a desolation scene — the creatures that will occupy the ruins, each finding its mate and nesting there — Isaiah stops and tells the reader to go and check.
Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read. Look it up. Verify it against the record. He is that confident about the detail, down to the pairing of birds in a wasteland.
It is a small verse and a striking attitude, and it stands against everything in chapter 29, where the book was sealed and two men handed it back without opening it. Isaiah’s instruction is the opposite: read it yourself, and see whether what I have told you is in it.
The Desert Shall Blossom As The Rose
“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God.”
Isaiah 35:1, 2
And then the chapter turns, and the turn is one of the sharpest in the Bible.
Chapter 34 ended with a land turned to pitch and brimstone, the streams burning, thorns coming up in the palaces. Chapter 35 opens on a wilderness rejoicing. Isaiah put them next to each other on purpose, and they are the same landscape treated two ways: one place becomes permanently uninhabitable, and another place that was already desert breaks into flower.
And the desert is not merely watered. It is given other places’ glory: the glory of Lebanon — the cedar forests. The excellency of Carmel and Sharon — the two most fertile districts in the country. The waste ground is handed the reputation of the best land in Israel.
Then the reason, and it is not agricultural: they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the excellency of our God. The blossoming is a response. Something arrives, and the ground answers.
Strengthen Ye The Weak Hands
“Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you.”
Isaiah 35:3, 4
The instruction is given to people, about other people, and it is physical.
Weak hands and feeble knees are the signs of exhaustion at the end of a long walk — the hands that cannot grip any more, the knees that will not hold. Isaiah does not tell the tired people to try harder. He tells the ones still standing to go and hold them up.
The writer of Hebrews took the line and applied it to a discouraged congregation: “Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble knees; And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed” (Hebrews 12:12, 13). Same image, and he adds the road, which is where Isaiah is going in five verses.
And what they are told to say is worth weighing: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence; he will come and save you. The comfort offered to frightened people is the same sentence that terrified Edom in chapter 34 — the day of vengeance and the year of recompences. It is one event. Which side of it you are on determines whether it is the worst news in the book or the best.
The Answer Jesus Sent To John
“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.”
Isaiah 35:5, 6
Four disabilities, and then water in the desert in the same breath, as though healing a body and irrigating a wasteland were the same kind of act. In Isaiah they are.
And this passage has a specific afterlife. John the Baptist, in prison and no longer sure, sent to ask whether Jesus was the one. It is one of the most human moments in the Gospels — the man who had identified Him at the Jordan, asking from a cell whether he had been right.
Jesus did not send back reassurance. He sent back this chapter.
“Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
Matthew 11:4, 5
Blind, lame, deaf — Isaiah’s list, in Isaiah’s order, reported as things that had happened that week. Jesus is saying: you know the chapter; check it against what is going on. John would have recognized it immediately, and he would have known that the same chapter ends with the ransomed coming home.
The Way Of Holiness
“And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there”
Isaiah 35:8, 9
Isaiah has been laying this road for twenty-four chapters. There was a highway out of Assyria in chapter 11 and one between Egypt and Assyria in chapter 19; chapter 40 will have a way prepared in the wilderness, and chapter 57 will send a crew out to clear the stumblingblock. Here it gets its name.
Two things are said about who uses it, and they need holding together. The unclean shall not pass over it — there is a restriction, and it is real. And the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein — the restriction is not competence.
Then verse 9 removes the other danger. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast. Anyone traveling in that country went in company because of what lived along the road. On this one the traveler is safe not because he is armed but because the predators are absent — the same arrangement as chapter 11, where nothing hurts or destroys in all God’s holy mountain.
Though Fools, Shall Not Err Therein
That one clause deserves its own moment, because of what it says about the character of the road — and, behind the road, about the book.
A road that fools cannot get lost on is a particular kind of engineering. It has no unmarked junctions and no stretch where you have to work it out. The safety is built into the route rather than supplied by the traveler, which means the promise is not that the pilgrims will be clever. It is that the road will not require them to be.
Ellen White quotes this clause about Scripture itself, and the sentence she puts in front of it is the argument: “The Bible unfolds truth with a simplicity and an adaptation to the needs and longings of the human heart that has astonished and charmed the most highly cultivated minds, while to the humble and uncultured also it makes plain the way of life” — and then, immediately, “The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.” She adds: “No child need mistake the path” (Education, p. 170).
Set that beside chapter 29, where the learned man said I cannot; for it is sealed and the unlearned man said I am not learned. Isaiah 35 answers the second man directly. The road was built for him. Whatever kept him out, it was never his lack of schooling.
Sorrow And Sighing Shall Flee Away
“And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
Isaiah 35:10
The road has an end, and here is what arrives at it.
The ransomed of the LORD. Not the worthy, not the qualified — the bought-back. That is the only description given of the people on the highway, and it settles the question of how the unclean were excluded and the fools were not.
With songs and everlasting joy upon their heads. Joy worn like a garland, on the head, where the wreath went in chapter 28 — the crown of pride that faded on the drunkards of Ephraim, replaced by one that does not.
And then the last clause, which is the one people remember: sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Note that both nouns are treated as things with legs. They do not fade or get forgotten; they flee, like something driven out of a place it had been occupying. And sighing is the smaller and truer of the two. Sorrow is an event and you can name it. Sighing is what a person does years afterwards, without deciding to, in a quiet room — and Isaiah says that goes too.
Two chapters, side by side. One land where the smoke goes up and nobody passes through for ever and ever. One road where fools do not get lost and the beasts are absent, ending in a city full of people who have stopped sighing. Isaiah wrote them in that order, and left the reader to notice that there is a road, and that it is open, and that the only qualification named for walking on it is having been ransomed.
