Isaiah 64:1-9: An Earnest Desire for Transformation

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you! As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil, come down to make your name known to your enemies and cause the nations to quake before you! For when you did awesome things that we did not expect, you came down, and the mountains trembled before you. Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him. You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, you were angry. How then can we be saved?

All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on your name or strives to lay hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us and have given us over to our sins.

Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, you are the potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all your people. - Isaiah 64:1-9

What does honest self-reflection tell us? That we don't deserve rescuing. That if God decided to wash his hands of us, he would be justified in doing so. We have seen in other passages that sometimes the only reason God acts is to fulfill his own promises, so that his reputation as a promise-keeping God is maintained. 

In this passage, the author has no reason why God should intervene. "How then can we be saved?" Their righteousness is filthy. God is angry. The consequences of their sin is killing them bit by bit. He can only go back to the basics: they are God's people, Zion is God's mountain and the temple in Jerusalem is God's temple. God is awesome and powerful-powerful enough to reshape them like clay in the potter's hand.

God has to rework each one of us, taking the base material that he started with, but remaking and reshaping us into the image of his son. The clay must remain quiescent: "You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, 'You did not make me'? Can the pot say to the potter, 'You know nothing'?" (Isaiah 26:16) Like Isaiah, we need to desire that transformation in God's hands more than we desire to live the flawed life we are living in our own hands.