Isaiah 48

¹ Listen to this, House of Jacob, you who bear the name of Israel, and have sprung from the seed of Judah; you who swear by the name of Yahweh and invoke the God of Israel though not in good faith or uprightness –

² calling yourselves after the holy city and bolstering yourselves on the God of Israel, whose name is Yahweh Sabaoth.

³ Things now past I once revealed long ago, they went out from my mouth and I proclaimed them; then suddenly I acted and they happened.

⁴ For I knew you to be obstinate, your neck an iron bar, your forehead bronze.

⁵ And so I revealed things beforehand, before they happened I announced them to you, so that you could not say, ‘My idol was the one that performed them, it was my carved image, my image of cast metal, that decreed them’.

⁶ You have heard and seen all this, will you not admit it? Now I am revealing new things to you, things hidden and unknown to you,

⁷ created just now, this very moment, of these things you have heard nothing until now, so that you cannot say, ‘Oh yes, I knew all this’.

⁸ You had never heard, you did not know, I had not opened your ear beforehand; for I knew how treacherous you were, and that you have deserved the name of rebel from your birth.

⁹ For the sake of my name I deferred my anger, for the sake of my honour I curbed it; I did not destroy you.

¹⁰ And now I have put you in the fire like silver, I have tested you in the furnace of distress.

¹¹ For my sake and my sake only have I acted – is my name to be profaned? Never will I yield my glory to another.

¹² Listen to me, Jacob, Israel whom I have called: I am the first, I am also the last.

¹³ My hand laid the foundations of earth and my right hand spread out the heavens. I summon them and they all come forward together.

¹⁴ Assemble, all of you, and listen; which of them has foretold this? ‘My beloved will perform my pleasure with Babylon and the offspring of the Chaldaeans.’

¹⁵ I, yes I myself, have spoken and summoned him, brought him and prospered his plans.

¹⁶ Come near and listen to this: from the beginning I have never spoken to you obscurely, and all the time these things have been happening, I have been present. – And now the Lord Yahweh, with his spirit, sends me.

¹⁷ Thus says Yahweh, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I, Yahweh, your God, teach you what is good for you, I lead you in the way that you must go.

¹⁸ If only you had been alert to my commandments, your happiness would have been like a river, your integrity like the waves of the sea.

¹⁹ Your children would have been numbered like the sand, your descendants as many as its grains. Never would your name have been cut off or blotted out before me.

²⁰ Go away from Babylon! Flee from the Chaldaeans! Declare this with cries of joy and proclaim it, send it out to the ends of the earth. Say, ‘Yahweh has redeemed his servant Jacob’.

²¹ Those he led through the deserts never went thirsty; he made water spring for them from the rock, he split the rock and water flowed.

²² There is no happiness, says Yahweh, for the wicked.