Isaiah 33:24 brings together the concepts of healing and forgiveness of sins. In this one verse, people are healed and their sins are forgiven:
No inhabitant will say, “I’m sick.”
The iniquity of the people living there will be forgiven.
In the ESV the two lines are connected with a semicolon, but when read in light of the most basic feature of Hebrew poetry, parallelism, the lines are even more closely connected.
This reminds me of Jesus healing the paralytic in Matthew 9.
For which is easier to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Rise and walk”?
Isaiah shows that the concepts are related. Matthew shows that in Jesus Yahweh had indeed “arisen and exalted himself,” just like Isaiah spoke of in 33:10. Jesus’s mercy is what Isaiah prayed for in Isaiah 33:2 — “Be gracious to us; we wait for you.” In Jesus’s first advent, the time of healing and forgiveness spoken of by Isaiah (Is 33:24) came near. The vision of Isaiah 33 is not brought to completion in Jesus’s first advent, but it was truly fulfilled — no resolution, but true incarnation.
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