Today’s Passage: Isaiah 12
After eleven chapters of thundering judgment and soaring promise, the first great movement of Isaiah does not close with a warning or a lament. It closes with a song. All the anger and all the comfort, all the threats against the proud and all the tender pledges of a shoot from the stump of Jesse, have been driving toward this: a redeemed people opening their mouths to praise. The chapter is short, only six verses, but it is the sunrise the whole first section has been leaning toward. First a single heart sings, glad that God’s anger has turned away and unafraid because God Himself has become its salvation, and then that heart calls out to draw joy like water from deep wells. Finally the song swells outward from the one to the many, from Zion to all the earth, until the whole redeemed community is shouting to the nations about the Holy One of Israel who dwells in their midst. It is one of the purest bursts of praise in all the prophets, and it shows us plainly where the road of grace was always headed.
As you read, hold this: This is where it all drives: the redeemed heart that trusts without fear and sings, drawing joy like water from the wells of salvation and telling the nations of the Holy One in its midst.
Context The world of Isaiah 12
The opening chapters of Isaiah rise and fall like waves, judgment breaking over Judah and then mercy breaking over the judgment, and just before this song the prophet reached one of his highest peaks. In chapter eleven he saw a shoot springing from the cut-down stump of Jesse, a righteous King on whom the Spirit of the LORD would rest, under whose reign the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. He saw the LORD reaching out a second time to gather His scattered people from the ends of the earth. Chapter twelve is the answer that rises from the throats of the gathered and the ransomed. It is the “in that day” song, the praise that belongs to the day of rescue.
The phrase that opens both halves of the chapter, “in that day,” ties it to everything Isaiah has been promising, the day when God’s saving work is finally accomplished and His people stand cleansed and safe. The song borrows its very words from the oldest song in Israel’s memory, the song Moses and the redeemed sang at the Red Sea, when they cried that the LORD was their strength and their song and had become their salvation. Isaiah reaches all the way back to that first great rescue and lays its words on the lips of a people rescued once more, and finally, teaching us that every deliverance God works is meant to end the same way: in worship. This is the note the whole first movement of the book has been reaching for.
Isaiah 12:1–2 (BSB)
¹ In that day you will say: “O LORD, I will praise You. Although You were angry with me, Your anger has turned away, and You have comforted me. ² Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid. For the LORD GOD is my strength and my song, and He also has become my salvation.”
Listen to how the song begins, for it begins exactly where the human heart most needs it to. It does not pretend the anger was never real. “Although You were angry with me,” the redeemed soul says, looking back honestly at the judgment it deserved, and then the wonder pours out: “Your anger has turned away, and You have comforted me.” There is no sweeter sentence a guilty person can learn to say. The wrath that once hung over me has been turned aside, and the very God who was rightly displeased now gathers me up and comforts me. And out of that comfort comes a trust so settled it can hardly be shaken: “I will trust and not be afraid.” Fear and faith cannot share the same throne, and here faith has won. See what makes the heart so bold. Not that the danger is small, but that God Himself has become its salvation. He is my strength when I have none, and He is my song when I have every reason to weep. This is the whole gospel in miniature, sung a thousand years before the cross: the God whose anger I feared has become the God who saves me, and so I will trust Him and be afraid of nothing.
Isaiah 12:3 (BSB)
³ With joy you will draw water from the springs of salvation,
Then comes one of the loveliest pictures in all of Isaiah, and I would have you linger over it. To a people who knew what it was to walk parched land under a burning sky, water was life itself, and here God does not offer a trickle or a shallow puddle but deep springs, wells that never run dry, and He tells them the drawing will be done “with joy.” Picture it. The redeemed heart lowers its bucket into the deep places of God’s saving mercy and comes up brimming, again and again, and there is laughter in the drawing. This is not a joy that has to be manufactured or squeezed out. It is joy drawn up fresh from an inexhaustible source, the yeshuah, pronounced yeh-shoo-AH. Strong's H3444, salvation, deliverance, rescue. This is the word that rings like a bell through the whole song, sounded three times in six verses, and it means salvation, deliverance, rescue, the whole saving help of God poured out on people who could never save themselves. It is worth knowing that this ordinary Hebrew word for salvation is the very root behind the name of Jesus, Yeshua, which means “the LORD saves.” So when Isaiah pictures a redeemed people drawing joy with buckets from the wells of yeshuah, he is pointing, without yet knowing the whole of it, toward the One who would one day stand up and cry that anyone who was thirsty should come to Him and drink. The song already knows the deepest truth about these wells: that salvation is not a thing we achieve but a spring we receive, a gift welling up from God’s own heart. And so the fitting response is not pride but praise, not striving but drinking, and drinking with joy. Every time a rescued soul draws up gladness from the mercy of God, it is drawing from yeshuah, and it does well to give thanks for so full a well. of God Himself. However often you come, the wells are full; however deep your thirst, the water rises to meet it. And notice, the song had just named God as our salvation, and now that salvation becomes wells we can drink from. What He is, we get to drink. The whole Christian life, at its truest, is this: a thirsty soul learning to draw joy, day after day, from the bottomless wells of what God has done to save it.
Isaiah 12:4–6 (BSB)
⁴ and on that day you will say: “Give praise to the LORD; proclaim His name! Make His works known among the peoples; declare that His name is exalted. ⁵ Sing to the LORD, for He has done glorious things. Let this be known in all the earth. ⁶ Cry out and sing, O citizen of Zion, for great among you is the Holy One of Israel.”
Now watch the song do what real joy always does: it cannot stay quiet, and it cannot stay small. What began as one heart praising becomes a whole people, and what began within Zion goes bursting out to the ends of the earth. See how the commands pile up, one glad imperative after another. Give praise to the LORD. Proclaim His name. Make His works known among the peoples. Declare that His name is exalted. Sing to the LORD, for He has done glorious things. Joy like this refuses to be hoarded; the moment a soul has tasted the goodness of God it wants the whole world to come and taste it too. And so the redeemed are told to make His deeds known not only among themselves but among the nations, to let it be heard in all the earth, because a God this good is not a private treasure but news for everyone. Then the song reaches its ringing final note, and it lands, as this whole book so loves to land, on the great title: “Cry out and sing, O citizen of Zion, for great among you is the Holy One of Israel.” There it is, the very name Isaiah has been sounding since chapter one, but hear how it rings now. In the first chapter the people had despised the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on Him. Here that same Holy One is not the accuser standing over them but the glory standing in the very middle of them, great and near and dwelling among His people. The One too holy to be trifled with has come to live in the midst of the ransomed, and the only fitting response is to cry out and sing.
Study notes Going deeper
The wells of salvation that Isaiah saw the redeemed drawing from with joy did not stay a picture on a prophet’s page. Centuries later, at a feast in Jerusalem when the priests were pouring out water in memory of God’s provision, a Man stood up and made the astonishing claim that He was the well Isaiah had seen, that the springs of salvation had a name and a face and were standing in their midst.
"...If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink." John 7:37 (BSB)
Hear how perfectly the song and the Savior answer one another. Isaiah promised deep wells and joy in the drawing; Jesus stood in the temple courts and said, in effect, the wells are here, they are Me, so come and drink. This is where the whole first movement of Isaiah has been driving all along, through judgment and promise alike: to a redeemed heart that has felt God’s anger turn away, that trusts and is not afraid, that draws its joy like water from a bottomless mercy, and that cannot help telling the nations about the Holy One who has come to dwell in its midst. That is the life the song holds out to every thirsty soul that will come. So draw with joy, sing to the LORD who has done glorious things, and take your place among the citizens of Zion crying out for gladness. Learn the Word, come to the wells of salvation and drink deep, and give thanks.