Wings Like Eagles

If you read Isaiah straight through, something shifts at chapter 40 that is hard to miss. The earlier chapters carry a great deal of warning and judgement. Then chapter 40 opens with comfort, and the whole register changes. I will not try to settle the long debate about how the book came together. What the text itself makes plain is the audience these words are aimed at: people who feel their cause has been overlooked, who say out loud that their way is hidden from the Lord (Isaiah 40:27). They are not strangers to faith. They are tired believers who have begun to wonder whether God is still paying attention.

That changes how I read verse 31. It is not a pep talk handed to the fresh and eager. It lands at the close of a long argument about who God actually is: the One who, in Isaiah 40:12 and 40:28, holds the waters in his hand and never tires. The promise of renewed strength rests on that. It is not ‘try to feel better’. It is ‘look again at who holds you’.

The verse just before ours is the hinge. Isaiah has spent verse 40:28 insisting that God himself never faints or grows weary, and then he turns to us: even young men faint and grow weary, and even the strongest stumble (Isaiah 40:30). I find that honest in a way I did not expect from an ancient text. It does not pretend the fit and the capable are exempt. The people most confident in their own engine are often the first to seize up.

Then comes the contrast in verse 31, and the very words for tiredness return. ‘They will run, and not be weary. They will walk, and not faint.’ The repetition is doing real work. The exhaustion God never suffers, and the exhaustion that flattens us, are the very things he promises to carry us through. The strength on offer is not a stronger grade of human grit. It is his own tirelessness, lent to people who have run out. That is why I think the short reflection is right to call this strength received rather than summoned.

The Hebrew verb behind ‘wait’ here (qavah) carries the sense of looking expectantly, of hope stretched out towards something. There is a traditional link, debated among scholars, between this root and the word for a cord or line, something drawn tight. I would not hang my whole faith on a single word study, and I am wary of preachers who do, but this sense of expectant hope is well attested across the Old Testament and it fits the passage. Waiting on the Lord is not the slack, bored waiting of a bus stop. It is hope held in the right direction.

The same verb turns up across the Psalms in exactly this hopeful sense, which is why the cross-reference to Psalm 27:14 sits so naturally beside this verse. So when I tell someone who is exhausted to ‘wait on the Lord’, I am not telling them to do nothing. I am telling them to keep the line taut, to keep looking towards him, rather than collapsing back onto their own emptying reserves. There is effort in it, but it is the effort of leaning, not of lifting.

Isaiah 40 was first read by people aching for restoration, and the New Testament writers reached straight for it. All four Gospels open John the Baptist’s ministry with the voice crying in the wilderness from a few verses earlier (Isaiah 40:3; Matthew 3:3, Mark 1:3, Luke 3:4, John 1:23). The comfort promised here is not finally about a journey back to a city. It points to the One who would come and bring people home to God.

I cannot read about those who wait for the Lord renewing their strength without hearing the invitation of Matthew 11:28, where Jesus offers rest to the weary and burdened. The cross-reference does more than echo a mood. It is the same offer, now with a face and a name. And when Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9 about grace being enough and strength reaching its full work in his weakness, he is living out Isaiah 40:31 in the plainest way: a man at the end of his own resources finding a strength that is clearly not his own. Psalm 103:5, with its picture of youth renewed like the eagle’s, reminds me this is an old and consistent line in scripture. God has always been the renewer.

I have prayed this verse far more often in the ordinary slog than on any mountaintop. The week a friend was in hospital and I had nothing wise left to say. The stretch of work that drained more than it gave back. The grief that does not announce itself but just sits there at breakfast. On mornings like those the soaring eagle is not the line I cling to. It is the last one: walk, and not faint.

What helps me is to stop trying to manufacture a feeling of strength, and simply to wait, looking towards him while my own tank reads empty. Often nothing dramatic happens. I do not feel remotely like an eagle. But I get up, I do the next thing, and by the evening I notice I was carried further than I had any right to be. That is the promise working quietly. It rarely looks heroic from the inside. It looks like still being upright at the end of a day you did not think you could face, and knowing, honestly, that you did not get there on your own.

• Where am I currently running on my own steam, and what would it look like to lean on God in that exact place instead?
• The verse moves from soaring to walking. Of flying, running and walking, which is the most honest picture of my faith this week, and can I let that be enough?
• Isaiah’s people felt their way was hidden from the Lord (Isaiah 40:27). Is there a corner of my life where I quietly believe God has stopped noticing me?
• If waiting is a taut rope rather than passive sitting, what would that change about how I pray tomorrow morning?

If you would like to keep sitting with verses like this one, you might find it helpful to read more from the book of Isaiah or to look through verses gathered by how you are feeling.