Isaiah 64:7
Isaiah 64:7
“There is no one who calls on Your name, who arouses himself to take hold of You; for You have hidden Your face from us and have delivered us into the power of our iniquities.”
The prophet’s lament acknowledges divine judicial hardening resulting from a severely deteriorated spiritual state in Israel. God hiding Himself indicates that God has given them up and given them over to reprobation, though it is not permanent and uncorrectable.
Steven L. Hitchcock: “Isaiah writes the perfect text of Scripture for the Calvinist, that is, until we read ‘...for You have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the power of our iniquities.’ The reason for ‘no one who calls on Your name, who arouses himself to take hold of You’ is because God has withdrawn His mercy and justly put the power of their sins on them. The important thing to see here is that it was not because God arbitrarily chose them for damnation, but that He is responding to their sins with hardening so that their sins will become evident. When the power of our iniquities dominate us we are not loving God and it is for this reason that God exposes us to darkness so that we might be forewarned of that greater darkness to come.” (Recanting Calvinism, p.177)
