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.

Most encouragement builds towards a high note. This one does the opposite. It starts in the air with eagles, drops to running, and finishes on the slowest verb of all: walking. I used to read that as a let-down. Now I think it is mercy. The promise is steered towards the ground, because the ground is where nearly all of life is actually spent. Flying is rare. Plodding is daily.

There is also an exchange tucked inside it. The strength is never described as worked up; it is renewed, swapped for the emptiness you bring. You wait, hands open, and what you hand over is your running-dry self; what you receive back is his. So the lowest line carries the heaviest freight. Not the spectacle of flight, but the quiet, costly grace of still being on your feet at dusk.

I have seen this one cross-stitched, printed across the back of running vests and read out at graduations, always as a promise of triumph: wait on God and you will soar. Strip away the condition and the audience and what is left is a motivational slogan wearing a chapter and verse number. The condition is waiting. The audience is people who have privately concluded that their way is hidden from the Lord (Isaiah 40:27). Say it to the fresh and the eager and you have handed them a promise addressed to somebody else.

The misuse that worries me more is quieter, and I have been guilty of it. Someone is still flattened after months of waiting, and the verse arrives as a diagnosis: if you had waited properly, you would be soaring by now. That turns a gift into a test, and Isaiah nowhere grades the waiting. He does not promise that the strength shows up as a feeling, or on a schedule you can hold him to. So the honest thing to say to a person in that state is usually that I do not know why it has not come yet, and I am not going to pretend this verse explains it.

If I were teaching this passage I would resist opening on verse 31, however well it lands. The eagle is the payoff of an argument, and preached on its own it floats free of the people it was written for. Build it in the order Isaiah built it.

• Open with the complaint in Isaiah 40:27. Let the room hear a believer accusing God of losing track of them, and let that sit a while before you offer anything at all.
• Go to God’s own tirelessness in verse 28 before you go anywhere near ours. Every scrap of strength in verse 31 is on loan from that.
• Then verse 30, where the young and the strong fail. This is the moment people stop assuming the promise is aimed at someone tougher than they are.
• Finish on walking, because the text does. If your climax is the eagle you have preached the verse backwards, and the person in row four who is barely upright goes home with nothing.

The mistake I made for years was reading all five verses aloud at the start and then expounding only the last one. Verse 27 needs to be in their ears twice.

This is the verse for the meeting that went badly, for the small-group leader who has run out of things to say, for a note to someone half way through chemotherapy or caring for a parent who no longer knows their name. It belongs in a midweek service about perseverance far more than in a celebration. Its centre is exhaustion rather than achievement, and it does its best work in the hands of somebody who has already been tired for a good while.

I would not reach for it at a graveside, or in the first raw days of grief. The eagle gets heard there as the person who has died soaring free, which is a lovely thought and not remotely what Isaiah is arguing: this promise is for the living who wait, not for the dead who have already arrived. Waiting also sounds hopeful and forward-leaning, which is precisely wrong for someone who cannot form hope yet. Presence does more in that room than any verse will, including this one. Keep it for six months later, for the ordinary Wednesday when they are back at work and nobody is asking how they are any more. That is when they might have room to hear it.

Isaiah’s exiles were not waiting in a spiritual vacuum. They were surrounded by a religion that read the sky for a living. Babylonian scholars kept long records of the moon, of Venus, of the wandering lights, and drew omens from them about kings, harvests and war. If you wanted to know whether it was safe to march, you asked someone who watched the heavens, because the heavens were reckoned to be divine. I am leaning on the general picture there rather than on any single text I could put in your hand, but the general picture is not seriously disputed.

A few verses before ours, Isaiah walks straight into that sky and asks who made it. Of the stars, he says that God “calls them all by name” (Isaiah 40:26). Read that in Babylon and it is not decoration, it is an insult. The lights the empire consulted are demoted in half a line to conscripts: mustered, counted out, answering to names somebody else gave them.

I did not grow up frightened of star gods, so it took me years to feel the edge on this. Once you do, verse 31 changes temperature. Waiting for the LORD, for those people, meant refusing to read the sky the way every neighbour read it. It meant staking exhausted hope on the one who named the stars rather than on the stars. Our version is rarely astrology. It is the quiet trust we hand to any system that promises to tell us how things will go, provided we read it correctly. Isaiah is asking tired people to wait on a person instead of a method. That is much harder. It is also much better, and I think he knew the difference cost them something.

Long before Isaiah, wings like eagles’ already meant something particular to Israel, and it was never the believer looking magnificent. At Sinai, God tells them what he has just done: he bore them on eagles’ wings and brought them to himself (Exodus 19:4). Moses’ song replays it in slow motion, an eagle stirring up her nest, fluttering over her young, spreading her wings and bearing them on her feathers (Deuteronomy 32:11). In both, God is the bird. The people are the fledglings, useless in the air, carried out of Egypt on somebody else’s back.

That memory is in the room when Isaiah writes. His chapter opens with a road through the wilderness (Isaiah 40:3), which is exodus language to anyone raised on the story, and it is addressed to people aching for another rescue like the first one. I cannot prove Isaiah had Exodus 19 open in front of him, and I would not trust anyone who told you they could. But I would be surprised if his hearers reached the eagle and thought only of birdwatching.

I resisted this reading for a long time, because I preferred the other one. Wings like eagles sounds like a promotion. I wanted the verse to say that if I waited well enough I would turn into something formidable, and here was my proof text. The exodus will not let me have it. Israel got out of Egypt without flapping once. The strength promised in verse 31 is not me finally growing the wingspan I always half suspected I had. It is being carried again, by the same God, in the same way, by people far too tired to fly and never once expected to.

I assumed for years that the eagle here was a picture of effort, the biggest wingbeat a bird can manage. It is close to the opposite. Large soaring birds do not climb by out-flapping everything else in the sky. They ride. They find a column of warm air lifting off open ground and let it carry them up in slow circles, wings held out flat and almost still, spending very little while the air does the work. Watch one long enough and it will barely move a feather for minutes together. The effort is real. It is simply not coming from the bird. (Translators have argued for a long time over whether Isaiah’s bird is the eagle or the great vulture that shares its skies, and I cannot settle that for you. For this picture it hardly matters. They climb the same way.)

What has stayed with me is the part that is less comfortable. A thermal is invisible. It is not everywhere, and no amount of wanting will make one. The bird cannot manufacture the air. It can only be up, and awake, and willing to turn into the lift when it finds it, which is a far more nervous business than the cross-stitched version ever suggests. And eagles do flap. They flap hard getting off a ledge or a fence post, before any of the free ride begins.

That is roughly what waiting has felt like to me, on the days it has worked at all. Not serene. Mostly getting airborne again on a wet Tuesday with no evidence in front of me, and then noticing, some way up, that something I did not generate is holding me.

I have to say the hard thing, because people I love have lived it. I have known people who waited on the LORD for years, by any honest measure of the phrase, and did not renew in any way you could see. Someone who nursed a husband for a decade and came out the other side simply used up. Someone who prayed this verse every morning of a long illness and faded anyway, and fainted, in the plain physical sense the word carries. Faint is not a poetic word here. It is what bodies actually do.

Here is the thing I only saw after years of squirming past it. The concession is already in the passage. The line immediately before the promise says the young and the strong go down (Isaiah 40:30), so Isaiah is not selling an exemption from collapse. He is offering a different supply for the same road, walked by the same breakable people, who will still get old and still get ill. Whatever renewal means in verse 31, it was never a claim that the waiting keeps you upright indefinitely. Read it as that and it will break in your hands the first time someone faithful dies tired.

So I have stopped grading anyone’s renewal, my own included. What holds me is that the waiting is never breath thrown at an empty sky, because the one being waited on does not tire the way we do (Isaiah 40:28). And when someone tells me the promise looks broken from where they are sitting, I say out loud that I can see why. Then I stay in the room. That has done more good, in my experience, than the verse ever did quoted at them.

Children ask the real question before they have learned to dress it up. If God gives new strength, why is Grandad tired all the time? I would not start with the eagle. I would start with something a child already owns: being so tired at the end of a day that your legs will not carry you properly to bed. Then I would say that grown-ups get that tired on the inside, where it does not show, and that it can last a great deal longer than one night.

I would not tell them that praying this verse makes tiredness lift by teatime. It is not in the text, and children remember exactly what you told them. Every shiny promise you hand a seven year old is one they may have to unlearn at nineteen, usually at the worst possible moment. So I would say that waiting on God is not a trick for making tired go away. It is more like leaning your whole weight on someone much bigger when your own legs have stopped working, and letting them hold you up while you cannot feel a single thing happening.

The question underneath is almost never about eagles. It is: will Grandad be all right? I will not answer that one, because I do not know, and a child can smell a dodge at forty paces. What I can tell them is who Grandad is leaning on, and that the leaning is not wasted even on the days when nothing changes, and that they are allowed to be tired too and to lean in the same direction. Children are better at that than we are. They have not yet learned to be embarrassed about needing carrying.

• 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.