AIContext written by AI, from the sources below. The Bible text is the World English Bible.
Isaiah 40:31 in context
You know the eagle verse. But did you know it answers people who said, “My way is hidden from the LORD”?
31 but those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles. They will run, and not be weary. They will walk, and not faint.
Isaiah 40:31, World English Bible
The story around it
This verse does not stand alone on a card. It is the last line of an answer, and the question it answers is hard. In the chapter before, King Hezekiah hosts an envoy from the faraway country of Babylon, and that visit is where the book of Isaiah first points toward the exile. By chapter 40 the exile is simply assumed. Jerusalem has fallen and the people of Judah are far from home.
The chapter opens with a word to them: “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. Then it makes room for what the people have been saying: “My way is hidden from the LORD, and the justice due me is disregarded by my God”.
The reply asks them to lift up their eyes to the heavens, and it says of the God who calls their host by name: “He gives power to the weak.” Even the youths faint and get weary, it says, “but those who wait for the LORD will renew their strength.”
Centuries later that same chapter opened a famous piece of music. The English aristocrat Charles Jennens put together the words of Messiah from Scripture and sent them to Handel in July 1741. The opening movements draw on Isaiah 40. Handel composed the score in just 24 days, and it was first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742, during Lent. Three charities were to benefit: relief for prisoners in debt, Mercer's Hospital and the Charitable Infirmary.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
The moment
The words are spoken to people who have just said that God does not see them. Before the verse comes a run of questions: “Haven’t you known? Haven’t you heard?” The God who “doesn’t faint” and “isn’t weary” is set beside the youths who do.
Then the line turns. The ones who wait for the LORD are given what the strongest young men cannot keep for themselves.
What stands around it
The verse before it says: “He gives power to the weak. He increases the strength of him who has no might.” The chapter began with comfort: “Comfort, comfort my people,” and it speaks of a God who “will feed his flock like a shepherd.”
What happened next
The people who said their way was hidden from God were not left in Babylon forever. A few chapters on, the book names the Persian king Cyrus and has God say of Jerusalem, “She will be built”. The book of Ezra tells how it happened: in Cyrus’s first year a proclamation went out, and all those “whose spirit God had stirred to go up” set out for home.
It was not a flight on eagles’ wings. It was a long road and slow rebuilding. When the foundation of the new temple was laid, the people sang and shouted. But many of the old men who had seen the first temple “wept with a loud voice”, and the crowd could not tell the shout of joy from the sound of weeping.
Later, in the rebuilt city, the people stood while God’s law was read aloud, and they wept. They were told not to grieve, “for the joy of the LORD is your strength.” Strength for tired people, once again, and once again it was not their own.
The chapter’s words kept travelling. All four Gospels reach for its third verse, the voice in the wilderness, to introduce John the Baptist. And when a letter in Peter’s name wanted to tell scattered believers what lasts, it quoted this chapter too: “the Lord’s word endures forever.”
How people have read it
Many readers hear the eagle as a picture of lifting above trouble. The verse names the soaring first, and that is the part most often quoted.
Others point to the order of the three lines. The verse ends not with flying but with walking: “They will walk, and not faint.” For some readers the quiet promise at the end is the larger one, strength for the ordinary road when no one is watching.
Both readings stand inside the same verse, and neither needs to cancel the other.
Who has argued over it
Two older commentaries read the eagle differently. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown note an old belief about the bird: The eagle was thought to moult and renew his feathers, and with them his strength, in old age
Matthew Henry takes the image as a lifting of the soul: In the strength of Divine grace their souls shall ascend above the world.
One looks at the eagle itself, the other at what the image does for the believer. Both are trying to say why the verse reaches the weary.
Background from outside the Bible. The sources are listed below.
What the context adds
This verse is an answer to people who said their way was hidden from God, and it comes after a chapter about a God who does not grow weary. Its promise is strength for those who wait for him, from flying to walking.
What it means for you
If you have ever felt that God has lost track of you, notice that the Bible lets people say so. “My way is hidden from the LORD” stands in this chapter word for word, and God answers it instead of silencing it. You can bring him the same sentence.
The answer the exiles got was not a date. They were not told when they would go home. They were told who God is: the one who calls every star by name and never runs out of strength. And they were told that waiting for him is not wasted time.
So if you are worn out, do not measure your hope by your own reserves. Read Isaiah 40 from the beginning, slowly. Lift up your eyes, as the chapter says. Tell God honestly where you are, and wait for him, even if waiting is all you can manage today.
If you do not share this faith, the chapter still takes seriously something many people know: the fear of being unseen. It answers that fear not with a promise of a quick way out, but with a reason to keep walking.
Other verses that say it too
But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me.” “Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yes, these may forget, yet I will not forget you!
Isaiah 49:14-15. Later in the same book Zion says it again: “The LORD has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me.” The answer is a mother who cannot forget her child: “yet I will not forget you!”
The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.
Lamentations 3:25-26. In a lament over fallen Jerusalem, the same hope is found in the same place: “It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD.”
Wait for the LORD. Be strong, and let your heart take courage. Yes, wait for the LORD.
Psalm 27:14. The psalm puts waiting and strength side by side, as Isaiah does: “Wait for the LORD. Be strong, and let your heart take courage.”
Therefore we don’t faint, but though our outward person is decaying, yet our inward person is renewed day by day.
2 Corinthians 4:16. Paul, pressed on every side, uses the same language of fainting and renewal: “we don’t faint”, because “our inward person is renewed day by day.”
Why we say this
Bible passages this page rests on, in the World English Bible:
This context was written by an AI model to help you see the verse in its setting. The Bible text is the World English Bible. Before publishing, an automatic check made sure every source below opens and every quotation matches its source. It can contain mistakes. If a source says otherwise, tell us.
