Isaiah 63:17

‘O Yahweh, why do you make us to err from your ways,

And harden our hearts from your fear?

Return for your servants' sake,

The tribes of your inheritance.

Your holy people were in possession but a little while,

Our adversaries have trodden down your sanctuary.

We have become as those over whom you never bore rule,

As those who were not called by your name.'

But instead Yahweh appears to be presiding over a situation where they are erring from His ways and hardening their hearts so that they no longer fear Him. This results, not from Yahweh's positive current action, but from how He had made man. It is His processes established at creation which are making them continue to err and become even more hardened (compare on Isaiah 6:10). And He is doing nothing about it. The thought is not that it is Yahweh's fault, but that because He presides over everything He presides over this too, and can do something about it.

So he pleads with Him ‘for His servants' sake' to return to viewing them with favour. ‘His servants' may here refer to the two patriarchs Abraham and Israel already mentioned (Exodus 32:13; Deuteronomy 9:27). Or it may signify the faithful followers of Isaiah. Or more probably here it may indicate those who were supposed to be His servants because they were the tribes of His inheritance (Leviticus 25:42; Leviticus 25:55; Deuteronomy 32:36; Deuteronomy 32:43). The land was always seen as God's land (Exodus 15:17; Joshua 22:19; Psalms 79:1), God's inheritance, committed into their hands as His covenant people, and therefore as His servants they were the tribes of His inheritance.

And the land was also seen as His sanctuary, for in Exodus 15:17 Moses speaks of ‘'the mountain of your inheritance, the place, O Yahweh, which you have made for you to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Yahweh, which your hands have established.' Isaiah may well, in fact, have had this reference in mind.

So he points out to God how short has been their tenure of that land. The people whom God had set apart for Himself had received possession of His land, His sanctuary, but it had only been for a little while. He had only been their King for a short while. And then the adversaries had come in and trodden down His sanctuary, His land, and they had become as people over whom He had never ruled, as those who had never been called by the name of Yahweh. That means either that they had just become an ordinary people like all the nations round about. Or alternatively, and more probably, that there is a moral implication. That his charge is that in their lives they had begun to live like those over whom He had never ruled, like those who had never been called by the name of Yahweh. They were being deliberately disobedient. Isaiah was ever sensitive to his people's failure to live as though they were Yahweh's people.

Alternately his reference to the sanctuary may have had in mind the continual subjection of the land with the consequent effect on the official sanctuary. First the Philistines had dominated them and destroyed the sanctuary at Shiloh. Then the Egyptians came to take possession after the death of Solomon and took away many of the temple treasures (1 Kings 14:25). And this would have been followed by many such examples (compare 2 Kings 14:13). The periods of peace and stability, even that under David and Solomon, never lasted very long. Then had come the Assyrians and the Temple had become the dwellingplace of Marduk and the other Assyrian gods (2Ki 16:8; 2 Kings 16:10; 2 Kings 21:5). God's sanctuary was regularly ‘trodden down', and was trodden down in Isaiah's day (compare Isaiah 1:12). He regularly went to the Temple and saw the effects of the treading down, the great altars dedicated to the host of heaven (2 Kings 21:5). And he knew that Yahweh had declared that the sanctuary was defiled and would have to be replaced (Isaiah 43:28; Isaiah 44:28). Let Him then act.

And worse still they are as if they were a people over whom Yahweh has never ruled. The current Davidic kings and the direct line of David have been rejected. His people are headless and hopeless. Their only hope is in His mercy, is if He comes to rule them again through the coming of His promised King.