The Messianic Consciousness in Jewish Prophecy (LXXIX) Isaiah

“And I have put My words in your mouth, and have covered you with the shadow of My hand, to plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth, and to say to Zion: 'You are My people'.” (Isaiah 51:16)

God reiterates His Love for Israel, underlying again the Torah as the encompassing principle of the Jewish identity. God's words (the Torah) are meant to be in Israel's expression in all dimensions of life, and they are the protecting hand on which His Creation is sustained. Thus we understand the Torah as God's blueprint of both the material and spiritual worlds. Being called His people by God is another reiteration of the same principle.

God's words are the foundation and purpose of His Creation, and these are put in Israel's mouth as expressions of being Jewish. These are meant not only to be uttered in our speech but also in all our actions, in order to “plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth”.

Let's be mindful that here He refers to Israel as Zion, for this is the awareness of our permanent connection with God. This verse is another one of many in the Hebrew Bible that make us aware that the Jewish identity lies in Zion as our eternal bond with the Creator. This reminder for Israel is the preamble for God asking us to return to Him.

“Stir yourself, stir yourself, rise Jerusalem, who have drunk from the hand of the Lord the cup of His fury. The goblet, the cup of trembling you have drunk, you have wrung out. There is not a leader to her out of all the sons she has borne, and there is none laying hold on her hand out of all the sons she has nourished.” (51:17-18)

God asks us to shake our consciousness, remove the fantasies and illusions were we have trapped our selves, and return to the elevated place of our permanent connection with Him (Jerusalem). He calls up to our common bond with Him, which is our Love and His Love. The Creator is telling us that the cup of His fury is nothing more and nothing less than our separation and distance from His ways and attributes. We have drunk until the last drop of our separation from Him, that makes us tremble in the suffering of living away from Love as our essence and true identity. All we have created out of ego's fantasies and illusions have not served to bring us back to Love's ways and attributes.

“These two things are meeting you, who is moved for you? Desolation and destruction, and the famine and the sword. Who? I comfort you.” (51:19)

Desolation and destruction are the cause and also the effect of lack (famine) and violence (the sword). God asks us again what can save us out of the negative traits and trends we chose to believe, create and do. None would move to save us from them, for they make us become like them (we become the idols we have made from our hands). Hence God reminds us that He is the only One who comforts us with His Love by waiting for our return to goodness as the cause and purpose of His Creation.

“Your sons have fainted, they lie at the head of all the streets, as a wild ox in a net. They are full of the fury of the Lord, the rebuke of your God.” (51:20)

Our negative addictions, attachments, obsessions, beliefs, thoughts, speech and actions make faint the goodness in us that leads us to live in the freedom of Love's ways and attributes. We end up in the streets of materialistic fantasies and illusions, in which ego as a wild ox is trapped. Our negative trends set the separation and distance from God's ways, and become His anger and rebuke.

“Therefore hear now this, you afflicted and drunken, but not with wine. Thus says your God the Lord, and your God that pleaded the cause of His people: Behold, I have taken out of your hand the cup of trembling, the goblet, the cup of My fury you do not drink it any more.” (51:21-22)

God makes us aware that our drunkenness is not by the joy and cheer that come from wine, but from the predicament of frustration, haughtiness, greed, coveting, indifference, depression, anger, additions, obsessions, attachments, etc. God repeats twice here that He is not only our Creator but also the Father and King that is always on the side of goodness for the sake and purpose of goodness. He already announced His Final Redemption, which means that He never separated from us and that it is up to us to return to His ways and attributes as the foundation of His Redemption.   

“And I have put it into the hand of them that afflict you, who have said to your soul: 'Bow down, and we pass over', and you have made your body as the ground, and as the street to them passing over.” (51:23)

God tells us that affliction and suffering belong to those who cause them. Negative deeds belong to their predicament and consequences, and those who live by them are afflicted by them. They make us bow to them as their slaves, and thus we are trapped and passed over as downtrodden to the ground, and turned into the ground itself. With this principle of cause and effect God makes us aware that the choice is only ours.