The Good News of Isaiah 61:10 = Rejoicing and Adorning

The Good News of Isaiah 61:10 = Rejoicing and Adorning.

“I rejoice greatly in the Lord! My whole being to the depths of my soul rejoices in my God! For He has clothed me with garments of salvation and wrapped me in a robe of His righteousness, as an honored bridegroom wears a beautiful headdress and as a dignified bride adorns herself with jewels of splendor.” (Isaiah 61:10).

With the Hebrews, Praise was an Art Form:  exuberant with raised arms; exultation accompanied by holy dance; spontaneous songs sung during worship; combining a petition with a praise in the same breath; making a joyful noise with a loud shout of celebration; praise with hands lifted up high in the air and arms extended; bowing low in adoration; lifting up one’s whole being to God in praise, including heart, hands, voice, eyes, soul; spin around in joy and praise; jump for joy; to declare praise very loudly like a roaring lion; bless God on bended knee, praising Him humbly while kneeling; to allow silence itself to praise God, blessing Him in reverence without exclamations but with soft murmuring; magnify and glorify God in praise by raving about His greatness and spiritual weight; to invite all of nature to join you in praise and worship; praise with music, celebrating in song with voice and/or stringed instruments; to enjoy a circle dance with other worshipers, as well as the more spontaneous whirling and twirling in the spirit. “The area of ancient Israel’s greatest creativity, and so what they did best, was the praise of God.” (Dr. Ellen Davis, Duke Divinity School).

REJOICE #1. Isaiah twice expresses the action of rejoicing in the beginning of this amazing verse, but he uses two different Hebrew words to more fully describe what he is getting at. The first rejoice is “sus” or “sis,” which translates to delight with overflowing joy, to make mirth to a great degree, to exult with exuberant gladness. The scholars say that this word is rooted in covenant joy, that all this gladness is a believer’s response to God’s initiative to graciously provide divine rescue and to remain permanently faithful to His Covenant with them.

REJOICE #2. The second rejoice that Isaiah uses is the Hebrew word “giyl,” which is an even more physical form of worship and praise… the word means to spin around with great emotion out of exuberant joy; to express an animated, vocal, physical outburst of gladness; to unabashedly exult; to greatly rejoice; to be exceedingly glad; to physically express one’s joy with jubilation; to rejoice in God in a highly spirited way. It is used about 45 times in the Hebrew Bible, and is the usual word for “rejoice.” So in this passage Isaiah is quite seriously calling into question the shy, sit-on-your-hands, don’t go out on a limb style of worship. Put everything into it, says Isaiah. Express yourself!

GARMENT OF SALVATION. The word for salvation here is “yesha,” which means rescue, deliverance, to bring out of danger into safety. Salvation was understood as a comprehensive well-being because of divine intervention. And so once again the Covenant is at the root of their understanding of deliverance, that they are a rescued people because of God’s covenant love and His permanent loyalty to His promise of mercy and faithfulness. And does that Hebrew word yesha remind us of anyone in particular? Yes, that’s a direct reference to the future Messiah, Yeshua, which means LORD Is Salvation, or the LORD Who Delivers, or LORD To The Rescue! Centuries before Jesus made His appearance, Isaiah already knew all about it. Salvation comes to us through Jesus in all three tenses… In the past tense, we have been saved. In the present tense, we are being saved. In the future tense, we will be saved.

1. We have been saved from the stain of sin in our soul, from the righteous judgment of God. In union with Christ, we have become new creatures, and we have been rescued and then adopted into God’s family as His children. That’s a done deal. We have been delivered from our old selves into our new selves.
2. We are being saved from sin’s grip on our character, from our slavery to fallen impulses and sinful inclinations. Our current life in Christ is gradually but surely transforming us, freeing us from sin’s dominion over our old life and bringing us into His light, from one glory to the next. It’s a process of being sanctified. We are being saved from sin’s consequences in our human nature.
3. We will be saved from a sinful world and brought into a Kingdom of God’s making, a City of light and fellowship with our God of salvation. We live in hope because of our future deliverance, a time when we are not subject to a fallen, broken world of pain, suffering and death. We will be saved as we enter the eternal City of God.

ROBE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. The Hebrew word here is rooted in the word for righteousness and saving justice… a person who is upright, just, godly, in right standing with God; who lives according to God’s standards; who embraces a life that is in conformity to God’s moral order. This word, “tzeddek,” is actually a title in Judaism that is given to people who are especially outstanding in piety, holiness and righteousness, and the “tzaddik” has been described as someone who oozes goodness, who takes joy in justice, who loves to blamelessly puts things right. A righteous person is one who lives a life pleasing to God. A tzaddik is a believer who recognizes that a righteous God has created a moral universe and expects His followers to live righteously and justly to reflect His purposes for mankind.

Righteousness and Justice are Kissing Cousins. It seems righteousness and justice are each used to accompany the other in Scripture, and both are often said in the same breath. A righteous person reveals his/her righteousness by practicing justice. A just person is certainly that way because s/he is filled with righteousness. And both qualities together form a central characteristic of God’s character. To be just and righteous is to live in a way that is consistent with the moral demands of God. To do what is right and just is to be in synch with the very Spirit of God. For the only possible Source of justice and righteousness, the only perfect example we have of those qualities, is the Lord Himself. Taken together, justice and righteousness are demonstrating “the perfect rightness of God,” the holiness of the Lord, and is deserving of highest honors and acclaim. As the prophet Isaiah exclaimed earlier in his book, “Yahweh Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, is exalted through His justice (mishpat); God the Holy One proves His holiness through His righteousness and justice (tzaddeq).” (Isaiah 5:16).

CLOTHED. In this passage Isaiah is using his inspired imagination to give us a helpful word-picture about clothing ourselves in God. This wasn’t original to Isaiah, as we can see from Psalm 132:9,16: “Let your priests be clothed with righteousness… I will clothe Zion’s priests with salvation.”  As well as in Job 29:14: “I put on righteousness, and it clothed me; my justice was like a robe and a turban.” But Isaiah loves this metaphor too, using the clothing imagery in 52:1:“Put on your strength, O Zion; put on your beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city!” and twice in 61:3 with his references to “a beautiful headdress” and “a garment of praise.” This picture of being clothed in faith is central to this passage in Isaiah 61:10.

St. Paul enjoyed a deep dive into this picture of spiritual clothing from the Hebrew Bible. He loved the idea of being clothed in Christ, of taking off and putting on our spiritual clothing. Being “in Christ” means that we are wearing His clothes, we are inside His character, we are covered by Him and hidden in Him.

1. “Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life, is with Christ in God. He is your life… So you’re done with that old life. It’s like a filthy set of ill-fitting clothes you’ve stripped off and put in the fire. Now you’re dressed in a new wardrobe. Every item of your new way of life is custom-made by the Creator, with His label on it. All the old fashions are now obsolete.” (Colossians 3:9-11, MSG);
2. “Clothe yourself with the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.”  (Romans 13:14);
3. “You are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” (Galatians 3:27);
4. “You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.” (Ephesians 4:22);
5. “But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet.” (1 Thessalonians 5:8);
6. “So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.” (Col. 3:15-17, MSG).

GARMENTS OF HIS PRESENCE. Christians have a holy garment to put on. We put on Christ, we wear garments of His Presence. Faith indeed has a uniform. Following Jesus is like putting on a whole new wardrobe, a new set of clothes. We are now wearing Christ, we have a new identity, a different look, a new style that reflects our heart’s desire. Following Jesus means we are now clothed in a different line, we have a new fashion designer. We have changed wardrobe consultants, and we are now covered in a new garment, a robe of righteousness. We have put on God’s goodness as our garment, and righteousness as our covering. Our new uniform reflects a right standing with God, as well as a pursuit of what pleases God out of our response to His love. Our new wardrobe now reflects God’s nature and character as He transforms us from within. We are now clothed in Christ, displaying the very virtues of God, reflecting a state of righteousness offered through the grace of Jesus. Our uniform has an identity. We want to identify ourselves with Christ. We want our life-clothes to reflect our heart-faith.

Patty Loveless “Two Coats” w/lyrics

First, Take Off, Then Put On. The root Hebrew word Isaiah used for “adorn” is used for both putting on clothing and taking off clothing. And this is something to think about… Before we put on, we have to take off. We need to strip ourselves of the old Adam as we put on the new Adam. Putting off our old garment starts with repentance, to confess our old nature to God. Our new wardrobe represents repentance, our confession, our desire to strip off the old and put on the new. God’s grace is the only power strong enough to enable us to take off and put on. When we put on our new set of clothes, we need to keep growing, making sure the outside is matching up with the inside. We need to make sure our new identity matches up with our growing faith. It’s easy to simply obey a set of rules, to simply put on holy appearances, a righteous exterior, a superficial goodness. Jesus gave some stern rebukes to those religious leaders who were self-righteous hypocrites, actors wearing a stage costume of righteousness. Putting on Jesus means we have genuine character on the outside, nurtured by the Holy Spirit, which matches up with the maturing faith on the inside. A mere costume of goodness is not sufficient, because we know that “people judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7).

A SPIRITUAL UNION. Isaiah highlights the fact that all through Scripture, the marriage covenant was the best picture available when thinking about the Biblical Covenant between the Lord and His Chosen People. Time and again, the Lord Yahweh referred to Himself as the husband and His people as the bride… “For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of Hosts is His name; and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel; He is called the God of the whole earth.” (Isaiah 54:5); “Return, O backsliding children,’ says the Lord; for I am married to you. I will take you, and I will bring you to Zion.” (Jeremiah 3:14); “…not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord.” (Jer. 31:32); “Thus says the Lord: ‘I remember you, the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved Me and followed Me through the wilderness.” (Jer. 2:2); “I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy; I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord.” (Hosea 2:19); “As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, your God will rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5). When His people were unfaithful to the Covenant, the Lord called them whores. When they were loyal to the Covenant and obeyed the Agreement, the Lord didn’t hold back on His praise for them. The idea of God marrying the Israelites began at Mt. Sinai, seen in Judaism as a wedding ceremony, the ketubah, between Yahweh and His Chosen people.

The Wedding Ceremony on Mt. Sinai. The Lord started preparing the bride for marriage by wooing her with the Ten Plagues, betrothing her by rescuing Israel from Egypt. The coming Marriage Covenant was a match made in heaven. The holy mountain was the wedding chapel, and the best man was Moses. After the Lord proposed to His bride by saying to them at Sinai, “I brought you to myself, and you shall be a special treasure to Me above all people” (Ex. 19:3-6), the people accepted His proposal by proclaiming, “Yes! All that Yahweh has spoken we will do!” (Ex. 19:7-8). After the bride was sanctified for the wedding, the Husband ratified it with thunder and lightning, a dense cloud, a giant fire with billowing smoke, an earthquake, increasingly louder blasts from a heavenly shofar, and the dramatic presence of the Husband Himself walking down the aisle on the top of Mt. Sinai (Ex 19:14-20). The wedding vows, rather one-sided of course, were laid out in Exodus 20-23, and included the Ten Commandments, household duties such as moral principles, behavior taboos, worship guidelines, expectations for justice and kindness, and other important ways to honor their covenant with the Lord Husband. The Bridal people affirmed the vows as read to them by Moses, exclaiming, “All that the Lord has said we will do, and we will be obedient!” (Ex. 24:3-7). Since Yahweh intended to remain with His bride throughout their wilderness journey, He instructed them on how to make a suitable home for Him during their travels, the portable Tabernacle in which He would dwell. (Ex. 26). The Jews have always considered the desert journey to be “their honeymoon, the bride and Groom alone together, consummating their union in love.” (Rabbi Jonathon Sacks).

The Bridegroom Adorns the Bride. This powerful imagery of God marrying His Chosen People, this picture of the Lord seeking out the role of divine Husband with His bride Israel and carefully adorning His people with beautiful clothing, is carefully described in Ezekiel 16 as the word of the Lord was clearly proclaimed… “When I passed by you again and saw you, behold, you were at the age for love, and I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness; I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord God, and you became mine. Then I bathed you with water and washed off your blood from you and anointed you with oil. I clothed you also with embroidered cloth and shod you with fine leather. I wrapped you in fine linen and covered you with silk. And I adorned you with ornaments and put bracelets on your wrists and a chain on your neck. And I put a ring on your nose and earrings in your ears and a beautiful crown on your head. Thus you were adorned with gold and silver, and your clothing was of fine linen and silk and embroidered cloth. You grew exceedingly beautiful and advanced to royalty. And your renown went forth among the nations because of your beauty, for it was perfect through the splendor that I had bestowed on you, declares the Lord God.” (vs. 8-14).

Hidden in Christ, we are clothed in the beauty of the Lord God and covered in Him.