Isaiah 40: “They shall mount up with wings as eagles”

A new voice for weary exiles

Chapter 40 marks a clear change of tone in the book of Isaiah. The first 39 chapters are dominated by warnings in the time of the Assyrian threat. From here on, the audience is a people who have already suffered the worst: Jerusalem destroyed and many of its citizens carried off to Babylon. Many scholars attribute these chapters to a later prophet in Isaiah's tradition, while others hold that Isaiah himself foresaw the exile. Either way, the message is addressed to exiles.

It begins tenderly: Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, speak comfortably to Jerusalem. A voice cries out to prepare a highway in the desert, because God is coming to lead his people home.

What does Isaiah 40:31 mean?

The verse answers a complaint quoted in verse 27. Israel says, in effect, God has forgotten us, our case has slipped past him. The prophet replies by pointing to the Creator who brings out the host of heaven by number and calls each by name, who does not faint or grow weary, and whose understanding cannot be searched out. He gives power to the faint.

To “wait upon the LORD” is not to sit idle. The Hebrew verb, qavah, is often linked to a noun for a cord pulled taut, and it carries the sense of hopeful expectation, leaning toward what God will do. Those who wait this way “renew” their strength; the word can mean to exchange, as if trading their exhaustion for his strength.

Then the three images, of which our print carries the first: soaring like eagles, running without weariness, walking without fainting. The order seems backward, from the most spectacular to the most ordinary, but that is the point. Some days call for soaring; most days simply require the strength to keep walking.

Graduations, recoveries and long races

Isaiah 40:31 is one of the most quoted verses in American life, printed on graduation cards, sports team banners and hospital room walls. Runners and athletes claim it, and so do caregivers and people in recovery, which says something about how wide its promise reaches. In the film Chariots of Fire, the Scottish runner Eric Liddell reads the passage aloud from a pulpit in Paris.

Echoes in the New Testament

All four Gospels apply the voice crying in the wilderness, from verse 3, to John the Baptist. Verse 8, that the word of our God shall stand for ever, is quoted in 1 Peter 1. And the eagle image appears earlier in Exodus 19, where God says he carried Israel out of Egypt on eagles' wings.