Five-minute study · Day 195 · Isaiah 40
Isaiah 40:31
A word worth stopping on: renew חָלַף chalaph
You have heard this verse a hundred times. 'They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.' The verb translated 'renew' is chalaph. It does not mean to refurbish what you already have. Chalaph means to exchange, to swap one thing for another. The promise is a trade: your depleted energy exchanged for God's. You hand over what is spent. You receive what is full.
Word study: renew
- Hebrew
- חָלַף
- Pronounced
- chalaph
- Strong's
- H2498
- Definition
- To pass on, to pass through, to change, to exchange, to substitute. Carries the fundamental sense of one thing replacing another, a passing-through that leaves something different in its place.
Chalaph appears 28 times in the Hebrew Bible. BDB assigns it a range of meanings: to pass on or away, to pass through, to change, to sprout again, to exchange. The semantic core is substitution: one thing passes and another takes its place.
Oswalt's commentary on Isaiah 40-66 in the NICOT series emphasizes the exchange meaning. The verse does not say those who wait will have their existing strength topped off. It says they will chalaph their strength: trade it in. The image is commercial. You bring your spent currency and receive fresh currency in return. The old strength is gone. What you carry forward is God's.
The verb appears in other revealing contexts. Genesis 35:2 uses chalaph for changing garments: 'Change (chalaph) your garments.' Job 14:7 uses it for a tree that sprouts new growth after being cut: 'There is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again (chalaph).' In both cases, something old is replaced by something new. The garments are swapped. The stump sends up fresh shoots. The continuity is in the person or the roots, not in the garment or the branches.
The sequence in Isaiah 40:31 descends in intensity: mount up with wings, then run, then walk. Commentators often note that the order seems backward. Eagles soaring is the dramatic image. Running is less dramatic. Walking is ordinary. Oswalt argues that the descending order is the point. The hardest test of exchanged strength is the daily walk, the long ordinary stretch where endurance matters more than ecstasy. Soaring comes in bursts. Running has a finish line. Walking goes on indefinitely. The promise covers all three, and the climax is the most mundane.
The word for 'wait' (qavah) means to bind together, like twisting fibers into a rope. Waiting on God is the act of binding yourself to him, wrapping your frayed thread around his cable until the two are joined and the strength of one becomes the strength of the other.
Historical context · Sixth century BC, Babylonian exile
A Word Spoken to Exhausted Exiles
Isaiah 40 opens the section of the book that addresses the Babylonian exile. The first words are 'Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.' The audience is a displaced nation. They have been in Babylon for decades. The temple is destroyed. The monarchy is gone. The initial shock has given way to something worse: the slow erosion of hope that comes from years of unchanged circumstances.
Isaiah 40:27 captures their complaint: 'My way is hid from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God.' They believed God had lost track of them. The exile felt permanent. The response in verses 28-31 is a crescendo: God does not faint or grow weary (v. 28). He gives power to the faint (v. 29). Young men, the strongest members of society, stumble and fall (v. 30). Those who qavah (bind themselves to) the LORD exchange their strength (v. 31).
The historical context gives the descending sequence its weight. These people did not need eagle wings. They needed the strength to keep walking. The exile was a seventy-year walk through foreign territory with no visible end date for most of those who experienced it. The promise that they would 'walk and not faint' was the most relevant promise in the sequence. The ordinary endurance of daily faithfulness in a land that was not home: that was the real test.
Oswalt notes that the eagle imagery draws on Deuteronomy 32:11, where God is compared to an eagle that stirs up its nest and bears its young on its wings. The image is parental. The eagle does not teach its young to soar by sending them to flight school. It pushes them out of the nest and catches them. The exiles were out of the nest. The promise was that the same God who pushed was also the God who carried.
The chapter as a whole is structured as a legal argument. God calls witnesses: the nations, the coastlands, the heavens. He presents evidence: he measures the waters in the hollow of his hand (v. 12), he brings out the starry host by number (v. 26). The conclusion follows: a God this large does not lose track of displaced people. The chalaph of verse 31 is the practical implication of the theological argument. If God is this strong, then his strength is available for exchange.
For reflection
Chalaph is an exchange. You bring your depleted strength and trade it for God's. The sequence descends: soaring, running, walking. The hardest part is the daily walk, the long stretch where nothing dramatic happens and you simply need to keep going. Where in your life right now do you need endurance more than ecstasy? Bring that specific tiredness to God and name it. The trade is available.
Qavah, the word for 'wait,' means to bind together like fibers in a rope. Waiting is attaching yourself to the source.
Sources: BDB; Oswalt, 'Isaiah 40-66' (NICOT); Goldingay, 'Isaiah 40-55' (ICC)