Isaiah: The People Do Not Understand and Have Abandoned the Lord
Isaiah 1:2-4; Jeremiah 8:7; Jeremiah 51:5; Romans 8:6-8 - Poetic parallelisms compare “smart” sinners who have turned away from God to the animals who understand their place and Creator.
“Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth;
For the Lord speaks,
“Sons I have reared and brought up,
But they have revolted against Me.
An ox knows its owner,
And a donkey its master’s manger,
But Israel does not know,
My people do not understand.”
Alas, sinful nation,
People weighed down with iniquity,
Offspring of evildoers,
Sons who act corruptly!
They have abandoned the Lord,
They have despised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away from Him.”
Isaiah 1:2-4 NASB1995
Right off the bat in Isaiah 1, Isaiah tells the people of Israel and Judah that they are in trouble with the Lord. They have revolted against God, they do not understand, they are a sinful nation weighted down with iniquity. They are the offspring of evildoers and act corruptly. They have abandoned the Lord and despised the Holy One of Israel. They have turned away from Him. Animals know better; they obey and know who their masters are, but people do not.
Enduring Word has some good commentary on this passage:
a. Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: God called heaven and earth as witnesses against Judah. The leaders and people of Judah had resisted His will, and God now stated His case against them. We might think of heaven and earth as a “jury” that God presented the case before.
i. Romans 8:22 says, For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Creation is waiting for the deliverance that will come when the Messiah rules directly over all creation. When God’s people disobey, we might say there is a sense in which they “delay” that resolution of all things. So, heaven and earth have an interest in our obedience.
b. I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against Me: The leaders and people of Judah were like rebellious children, who never appreciated all that their parents did for them.
i. As parents, we can appreciate how frustrating and galling it is for our children to disregard and disobey us. It fills us with righteous indignation, and we think, “After all I have done for them, they treat me like this?” But we have treated God even worse than any child has treated their parents.
c. The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know: The leaders and people of Judah were not like dumb animals, such as the ox or the donkey. They were dumber than dumb animals. The ox at least knows its owner, but Judah didn’t know who owned them. The donkey knows who takes care of him, but Judah didn’t know who took care of them.
i. No animal has ever offended or resisted or rejected or disobeyed God the way every human being has. Any animal is a more faithful servant of God than the best human.
d. Alas, sinful nation: God clearly and strongly exposed their sin. They were laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, and they had provoked the LORD to anger.
The animals know better than us about God and His care for His creation and how He created them to act. We are truly dumber than the dumbest servant animals (and more stubborn than donkeys). According to commentary in Precept Austin Isaiah is using a grammatical tool called Parallelism. The Pocket Dictionary of Biblical Studies is quoted in that same Precept Austin section with this definition of parallelism:
Parallelism has the effect of saying the “same in the other” (C. S. Lewis) as a thought or an image in the initial line is taken up in the subsequent line(s). In the eighteenth century Robert Lowth identified three forms of parallelism: synonymous, where the second line reproduces the first; antithetical, where the second line is in contrast to the first; and synthetic, where the second line carries the thought of the first forward. Hebrew poetry is deceptively simple to translate because of this parallelistic feature, yet the various ways of balancing one line with another can work on the level of sound, form and even grammatical structures.
Recent studies have focused more on the subtlety of balancing that takes place between the lines and the necessity of taking into consideration all the linguistic features, not just the thought that is paralleled. For example, Job 5:14 reads:
They meet with darkness in the daytime,
And grope at noonday as in the night.
“Daytime” and “night” are a common contrasting word pair, and here they occupy the same position in the Hebrew (first, not last, as in the translation above). However, the other word pairs—”daytime” and “noonday,” “darkness” and “night”—occupy opposite positions in the lines but are similar in meaning (the verbs actually occupy the middle position in each line, and each line is comprised of only three Hebrew words). The poem begins with “daytime” and ends with “noonday” but in between lie “darkness” and “night.” Thus the poem is very tightly and artfully constructed around similar and contrasting images that parallel one another. (Patzia, A. G., & Petrotta, A. J. Pocket dictionary of biblical studies. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press)
Here’s the parallelism repeated from this passage:
An ox knows its owner,
And a donkey its master’s manger,
But Israel does not know,
My people do not understand.”
The prophet Jeremiah used a similar parallelism and invoked the animals as being superior to humans for their knowledge of their Creator that guides their instincts:
“Even the stork in the sky
Knows her seasons;
And the turtledove and the swift and the thrush
Observe the time of their migration;
But My people do not know
The ordinance of the Lord.”
Jeremiah 8:7 NASB1995
The second part of this passage in Isaiah 1 should be looked at again because of its hard-hitting message:
Alas, sinful nation,
People weighed down with iniquity,
Offspring of evildoers,
Sons who act corruptly!
They have abandoned the Lord,
They have despised the Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away from Him.”
The people have abandoned the Lord and are weighed down with iniquity. They are sinful and the offspring of evildoers. They have despised the Holy One of Israel and have turned away from Him. It’s like the picture above showing what used to be a lovely country church that has been abandoned to the trash and graffiti and weeds. It is apostasy, pure and simple.
According to Precept Austin, this is the first usage of “the Holy One of Israel” in Isaiah and it is used 25 times total in that book of prophecy, always pointing towards the Messiah. Jeremiah also uses this phrase:
“For neither Israel nor Judah has been forsaken
By his God, the Lord of hosts,
Although their land is full of guilt
Before the Holy One of Israel.”
Jeremiah 51:5 NASB1995
Precept Austin also has a short table showing where the people are now in the two kingdoms, in a fallen state, versus where they could be:
Obviously, the nation that has abandoned the Lord has abandoned their potential in Him. Paul a few centuries later had this to say about those who turn away from the Lord:
“For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace, because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
Romans 8:6-8 NASB1995
Next we will hear from Isaiah about the desperate condition of Judah in my next devotional examining Isaiah 1:5-9.
Heaven on Wheels Daily Prayer:
Dear Lord - Thank you for the inspirational and poetic words that Isaiah uses right away at the beginning of this lengthy book of prophecy. The “parallelisms” are a marvelous communications tool and reinforce the beauty of Your words through scripture. Amen.
Citations and Credits:
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.Lockman.org.
Precept Austin was accessed on 07/17/2026 to review commentary for Isaiah 1:2-4.
Commentary from Enduring Word is used with written permission and without any alteration. ©1996-present The Enduring Word Bible Commentary by David Guzik – enduringword.com.