Conclusion of Comfort for God's People

Abraham and Sarah were beyond their procreative years and were childless.  Yet, Jehovah promised  to bless Abraham and "to make him many."  (Genesis 17:1-6, 15-17)  By divine restoration of their procreative powers, Abraham and Sarah brought forth a child in their old age, and from him God's covenant nation sprang. Thus Jehovah made that one man father of a great nation whose number turned out to be as unaccountable as the stars in the heavens.  (Genesis 15:5; Acts 7:5)  If Jehovah could thus take Abraham from a distant land and form him into a mighty nation, he can certainly carry out his promise to free a faithful remnant from bondage in Babylon, restore them to their homeland and once again form them into a great nation. God's promise  to Abraham was fulfilled; his promise to those captive Jews will also be carried out.

The symbolic quarrying of Isaiah 51:1, 2 likely has a further application. Deuteronomy 32:18 calls Jehovah "the Rock" who fathered Israel and  "the One bringing [Israel]forth with childbirth pains."  In the later expression, the same Hebrew verb is used as that which appears  at Isaiah 51:2 with regard to Sarah giving birth to Israel.  Hence, Abraham stands as a prophetic type of Jehovah, the Greater  Abraham.  Abraham's wife, Sarah, well pictures Jehovah's universal  heavenly organization of spiritual creatures, represented in the Holy Scriptures as God's wife, or woman.  (Genesis 3:15; Revelation 12:1, 5)  In the final fulfillment of these words of Isaiah's prophecy, the nation that springs from "the rock' is  "the Israel of God," the congregation of spirit-anointed Christians, which was born at Pentecost 33 C.E. As discussed in previous chapters in 1918 but was restored in 1919 to a state of spiritual prosperity. -Galatians 3:26-29; 4:28; 6:16. 

Jehovah's comfort for Zion, or Jerusalem, includes more than just a promise  to produce a populous  nation. We read:  "Jehovah will certainly comfort Zion. he will for certain comfort all her devastated places, and he will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert plain like the garden of Jehovah. Exultation and rejoicing themselves will be found in her, thanksgiving and the voice of melody."  (Isaiah 51:3)  During the 70 years  of desolation, the land of Judah will revert to a wilderness, overrun with thornbushes, brambles, and other wild vegetation.  (Isaiah 64:10; Jeremiah 4:26; 9:10-12) In addition to resettling of Judah, the restoration will have to include the restoring of the land, which will be converted into an Edenic garden with well-watered productive fields  and fruitful orchards. The ground will appear to rejoice. Compared with its desolate condition during the exile, the land will be paradisiac. The anointed remnant of the Israel of God entered just a paradise in a spiritual sense in 1919. -Isaiah 11:6-9; 35:1-7.

Next time: Reasons for Confidence in Jehovah

From the Book Isaiah's Prophecy Light for all Mankind, Volume II, 2001