Isaiah 51

1 Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness and seek the Lord. Look to the solid rock you cut and the pit you dug.

2 Look to your father Abraham and to Sarah, who bore you. He was alone when I called, blessed, loved, and multiplied him.

3 Now I will comfort you, Zion, and I have comforted all her deserted places. I will make her deserted places like the Lord’s garden. Gladness, celebration, thanksgiving, and songs of praise will be found in her.

4 Listen to me, listen, my people. You kings, pay attention to me. A law will go out from me, and my judgment will become a light for nations.

5 My righteousness quickly draws near, and my rescue will go out like light. Nations will trust in my arm; the islands will wait for me and trust in my arm.

6 Lift your eyes to the sky and look at the earth below. The sky was made solid like smoke, the earth will wear out like clothing, and its inhabitants will die in the same way. But my rescue will last forever, and my righteousness will not fail.

7 Listen to me, you who know judgment, the people who carry my law in their hearts. Do not fear people’s insults or be overcome by their contempt.

8 Time will devour them like clothing, and a moth will devour them like wool. But my righteousness will last forever, and my rescue through every generation.

9 Wake up, wake up, Jerusalem, and put on the strength of your arm. Wake up as in ancient times, in the generations long ago.

10 Are you not the one who dried the sea, the waters of the great deep, and made the sea’s depths a path for those being rescued

11 and ransomed? With the Lord’s help they will return and come to Zion with joy and everlasting celebration. Praise and joy will rest on their heads, while pain, grief, and groaning will flee.

12 I myself am the one who comforts you. Consider whom you dreaded and feared: a mortal man, a human being, who wither like grass.

13 You forgot God, your maker, who made the sky and founded the earth. You constantly feared the anger of the one who afflicted you when he planned to carry you away, but where is that oppressor’s anger now?

14 When you are saved, he will neither stop nor delay.

15 I am your God, who stirs up the sea and makes its waves roar. My name is the Lord of armies.

16 I will put my words in your mouth and shelter you in the shadow of my hand, the hand with which I fixed the sky and founded the earth. The Lord will say to Zion, ‘You are my people.’

17 Wake up, wake up, and stand, Jerusalem. You drank the cup of the Lord’s fury from his hand; you drank and drained the cup of calamity, the cup of wrath.

18 None of all the children you bore comforted you, and none of all the children you raised took you by the hand.

19 These two things have come against you. Who will sympathize with your grief—collapse and destruction, famine and sword? Who will comfort you?

20 Your bewildered sons sleep at the top of every street like a half-boiled beet. They are full of the Lord’s anger and made faint by the Lord God.

21 Therefore listen, you afflicted one, drunk but not with wine.

22 This is what the Lord God, who judges his people, says: Look, I have taken the cup of calamity, the cup of wrath, from your hand. You will never drink it again.

23 I will put it in the hands of those who injured and afflicted you, who told you, ‘Bow down so we can walk over you.’ You flattened your body on the ground for those passing by.