Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; -- cease to do evil,
Isaiah's hearers were busy with worship — sacrifices, feasts, prayers — but God did not want a better ceremony. He tells them to wash, which raises the question of the whole chapter: how can such people make themselves clean?
The problem was not lack of religious effort. It was religion laid over a life God could not look at.
They had plenty of religious zeal. They also looked for a remedy for the obvious troubles of their day. But their remedies were worse than useless. Their divine privileges only made their moral state more shocking and unbearable. Apart from the Lord's mercy they were close to the doom of Sodom. Morally they were Sodom already. So their sacrifices, feasts, and assemblies were all the more hateful to the Lord. He felt their tread profaned His courts, and He refused to hear their many prayers. There was no real repentance and no trembling at His word — only a religious veil over open and shameless wickedness.
The wording sounds like Israel's ritual washings. But that is not what God is after, and He does not leave them to clean themselves alone.
Yet the Lord still stoops to call them to repentance and to the fruits that suit it. The wording comes from the ceremonial washings so familiar to the Jews. But moral reality is the point, as the next words make plain. God can tolerate iniquity nowhere, least of all in His people. They must therefore stop doing evil and learn to do good, proving it in the ways of ordinary life. But He also adds a gracious invitation: that He and they should reason together. Then they would soon find where the fault lay, and with whom is the grace that is willing to wash the foulest clean.
God aims this call at the heart, and He still makes it. Yet the washing it asks for is work He Himself takes up.
One thing is certain. Ordinary water could never remove the defilement of the Jew, or the blood-guilt of the Gentile (Job 9:30-31). And God's appeal still goes out: "O Jerusalem, wash your heart from wickedness, so that you may be saved. How long shall your wicked thoughts lodge within you?" (Jer. 4:14). "Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes" (Isa. 1:16)… But there can be no real national response until they look to Him whom they pierced. Then the Lord Himself will undertake their purification. He promised long ago: "I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses" (Ezek. 36:25).
The verse ends where the next one begins, and the order cannot be swapped.
So the word is (vv. 16, 17): "Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean … cease to do evil, learn to do good." There is the weighty matter. Have a good conscience before God: if not, you become blind of yourselves before you are blinded by God. God distinguishes between actions. No one can learn to do good before ceasing from evil. No one can have light in the conscience without first leaving what wounds the conscience.
A common reply is that a person cannot leave what is wrong until he has found something better. The verse cuts that reply off.
Are you doing what you know to be wrong? Does anything tie you to what you admit is against Scripture? Then listen to the word of the Lord: "Cease to do evil." And be sure of this: once you obey this word, you will not stay in the dark about your path for long. It is sheer unbelief that makes us say, "I cannot cease to do evil until I find something better."
The verse is half of a pair. To treat the cleansing as the whole work is its own danger.
In the Old Testament God's people heard, "cease to do evil" and "learn to do good." In the New Testament we hear, "Abhor what is evil" and "hold fast to what is good," and the like (Isa. 1:16-17; Rom. 12:9). In Spirit-led, God-fearing souls these always go together. To rest in having separated from evil would be a real danger. It might soon lean toward greater evil, or end in cold and dry orthodoxy.
- Clean, not busier. Their worship was full and their lives were foul. More sacrifices could not answer a state that was Sodom under a religious veil.
- Clean in reality. The wording borrows Israel's ritual washings. God asks for a moral cleansing, shown in ordinary life.
- Clean by God. No water ever washed away such defilement. God promises to sprinkle clean water Himself and make His people clean.
- Clean first, then taught. No one learns to do good while the conscience is still wounded. Stop the evil, and light comes.
- Clean is not the finish. Ceasing and learning belong together. Stopping alone can drift into greater evil, or into dry orthodoxy.
learn to do well seek judgment, gladden the oppressed, do justice to the fatherless, plead for the widow.
God has just told a religious nation that He hates their feasts and sacrifices. Now He says what He wants instead: not better worship, but justice for people who have no one to defend them.
God puts the two halves of His demand in a fixed order. One writer, commenting on the call to wash and put away evil, ties it to the conscience:
That is the serious matter. Have a good conscience before God. If you do not, you blind yourselves before God blinds you. God distinguishes between actions. No one can learn to do good before he stops doing evil. No one can have light in the conscience without first leaving what wounds the conscience.
That order is not a delay tactic. It is how God teaches anyone at all:
Separation from evil is always insisted upon throughout the Bible. It is especially stressed as a prime necessity for the godly soul in days of ruin. By it one gives a visible proof of the activity of a divine nature that hates evil and loves good and desires to obey and honour the Lord. "Cease to do evil; learn to do well" (Isa. 1:16, 17); this is always God's order. The first step is to separate from evil and then God will teach that one His will and will show him the next step.
The list that follows the command is not ceremonial at all. God had refused their feasts, and then named what He was after instead:
Study the prophets, the greater and the minor, and you will find that their ministry always had this one end. It was to bring the people into moral conformity with God. Because this was missing, the time came when even their sacrifices and feasts were an abomination. However carefully they tried to carry out the temple worship, God would not accept it. These are the terrible words from the lips of Isaiah, "Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates." Then he tells them what the Lord requires: "seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause." Again, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?" (Isa. 1 and 58).
Two of these duties name people who have no one to speak for them. Writing on the laws God gave Israel about the same two groups, one commentator explains why they head the list:
God next commends the helpless to their hearts. Of all the helpless ones who appeal to our compassion, the widow and the fatherless surely have the first claim. So God surrounds them here with the powerful defence of His own arm. If anyone afflicted them, he would be killed, and his own wife and children would be left a widow and orphans. All through Scripture God marks out these two groups as the special object of His care, so they should be the object of our compassionate concern. So James says, "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." (James 1:27.)
The verse says "seek justice" before it names the fatherless. Another writer, on a psalm with the same demands, holds justice and pity together:
But this cared for, they must show Him also on His salvation side, in His regard for the poor, the weak, the defenceless, and the oppressed. "Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute." It must still be justice: pity for the poor must never violate it. There was a special commandment about this (Ex. 23:3). Yet his poverty should still make him an object of special and tender interest.
Much of Isaiah 1 belongs to Israel. One writer says this call does not stay there:
God can tolerate iniquity nowhere, least of all in His people. So they must cease from evil and learn to do well, proving it in the ways of ordinary life… In the earlier of these verses there is much that we can freely take to ourselves now. God's unchanging principle is to join repentance to faith, and to insist on suitable works and ways in everyone He draws to Himself. The words apply in a special way to believers who shirk responsibility and trifle with a clear conscience.
- Cease. Drop the evil first; a conscience with a wound in it cannot take in light.
- Learn. Doing good has to be learned, and God keeps the order: leave the evil, then learn the good.
- Seek. God answered rejected sacrifices with a call for justice; the prophets aimed at people in moral conformity with God.
- Defend. The fatherless and the widow have the first claim on compassion. God surrounds them with the defence of His own arm.
- Prove it. The call reaches everyone God draws to Himself, and ordinary daily life is where it shows.