Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Most of what we've read in Isaiah has been God speaking or Isaiah speaking. But today we enter a

section that seems like it's the response of the people, a confession

recorded by Isaiah, or maybe he's speaking on their behalf, or maybe it's a mingling of both.

They confess their sins to God and acknowledge that they've felt the consequences of those sins.

Our sin has a way of making us feel distant from God. And to make matters worse, ultimately Israel knows they can't fix what's broken in themselves,

and it devastates them.

Have you ever felt this way?

Do you ever wonder when you'll live up to your idealized version of yourself?

The you that never gets angry in traffic or yells at your kids or says a mean word to your spouse

or struggles with addiction, Israel can relate. Versus 12 through 13 say, our transgressions are

multiplied before you and our sins testify against us. For our transgressions are with us and we

know our iniquities trans transgression, and denying the Lord

and turning back from following our God. But then verse 16 flips the script. God shows up, and the

verse says, Then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him. In other words,

God did for Israel what Israel couldn't do for themselves. God

himself, God the Son, fulfilled what he required but no one could live up to. This section at the end

of Chapter 59 can be kind of confusing in English, but the Hebrew I'm hacking my way through

makes it a bit clearer. It appears to be a passage where God the Father is speaking to God the Son about God the

spirit and about the whole family of God.

I'll read the verse to you, but first I should mention that the reason a lot of commentators

think this is because when God speaks to Israel, he uses the plural word for you, the

...