Isaiah has just charged Jerusalem's leaders with grinding the faces of the poor. Now he turns to the daughters of Zion, who 16"walk with outstretched necks." Then he catalogs their finery, anklets and headbands, pendants and bracelets and scarves, item after item, in a list that is exhausting on purpose. He wants no one to say later that the excess was exaggerated.
The reversal is built on one repeated phrase. 24"Instead of perfume there will be rottenness; and instead of a belt, a rope." Every ornament gets its opposite. The city that dressed itself in beauty sits on the ground at her own gates. War thins the men until seven women take hold of one man and ask only that they be called by his name, 1"take away our reproach." The shame that once belonged to being unmarried now belongs to being left with no one at all.
Then Isaiah uses a phrase for the second time in a very different way. "In that day," he wrote of the finery being stripped away. 2"In that day," he writes now, "the branch of the LORD shall be beautiful and glorious." It is the same formula with opposite content. Isaiah puts grief and glory back to back under one heading, as though daring the reader to notice how close together they stand.
"Branch" is the word later prophets use for a promised shoot from David's line: "a righteous Branch" (Jeremiah 23:5). Whatever Isaiah means here, the direction of the word is already set. Something beautiful is going to grow out of ground this chapter has just described as scorched.
The people who remain will 3"be called holy," after the Lord has 4"washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion" and cleansed its bloodstains by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning. The filth Isaiah described in such humiliating detail is washed away and removed. The fire that judges is also the fire that cleanses, and the two halves of the chapter need each other to be true.
Then the promise closes the section: 5"a cloud by day," and a flaming fire by night. Every Israelite would have recognized it as the pillar that led their ancestors through the wilderness, God's own visible presence going ahead of his people. Over all of Zion there will be 6"a booth for shade by day from the heat, and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain." The daughters of Zion had tried to manufacture the look of security with jewelry and linen. God offers the reality, a canopy and a shelter, given as a gift.
Ask what you wear to feel safe. It might be a reputation, a schedule kept full, or an appearance of competence. The chapter says all of it can be taken away, and that what waits on the other side of that day is a branch, a cleansing, and a cloud.
Prayer
Father, we have dressed ourselves in whatever finery we thought would cover our insecurity, and you have seen through it every time. Wash away what jewelry never could, the filth we carry under our careful appearances. Plant the branch of your own making where we sit mourning at gates we built. Be our cloud by day and our fire by night, until we need nothing else to feel safe. In Jesus' name, amen.