Sermons on Isaiah 45:7
The various sermons below converge on a few clear convictions: Isaiah 45:7 is read as a claim about God’s sovereign authority over both blessing and calamity, not as a simple endorsement of moral evil; the passages reject cosmic dualism and insist that calamity can be either permitted or ordained by God within his providential purposes. Across the treatments you’ll find recurrent pastoral moves—comforting the afflicted, diagnosing spiritual restlessness as absence of God’s Spirit, and urging trust in a sovereign Lord—alongside hermeneutical caution that the Hebrew can and should be read to mean “calamity/woe” rather than moral depravity. Nuances emerge as well: one strand frames suffering teleologically (God permits evil because it contributes to a redeemed humanity greater than pre‑fall innocence), another accentuates God actively sending chastening or purgative darkness as judicial action, a Job‑centered read foregrounds the “goddness” of Yahweh (all events are under his wise rule), and a literary‑lexical approach insists that accurate readings of Hebrew parallelism avoid ascribing moral evil to God.
What differs sharply is method and pastoral emphasis: some treatments prioritize close literary and lexical exegesis to reframe the key term as “calamity,” others deploy theological teleology to explain why God would permit suffering for a greater redemptive end, and others read the verse narratively to account for divine chastening that produces inner turmoil or restoration. The practical choices for a preacher therefore diverge—lean into the formation/eschatological telos and speak of redeemed greatness formed through suffering; lean into divine chastening and speak to repentance, discipline, and spiritual rest; insist on hermeneutical correction to protect God’s moral character and emphasize theological clarity—or combine elements, deciding how much weight to give permission versus active sending, telos versus judicial purpose, doctrinal assurance versus pastoral diagnosis—
Isaiah 45:7 Interpretation:
Understanding Levirate Marriage and God's Sovereignty(David Guzik) reads Isaiah 45:7 as a clear statement of divine sovereignty over both what God actively brings about and what he permits, framing the verse as a contrast between primary causation (what God performs) and secondary causation (what he allows); Guzik emphasizes that God does not lose control to world/flesh/devil but may permit darkness and calamity for a redemptive end — specifically arguing that God allows evil because he has "something greater for Humanity than innocence," namely redeemed, glorified people, so the verse teaches sovereign permission with telos (purpose) rather than God-as-author-of-moral-evil.
Saul and David: The Power of God's Spirit(Alistair Begg) treats Isaiah 45:7 as the theological background for the narrative claim that a “harmful spirit from the Lord” tormented Saul, interpreting the verse as support for God’s prerogative to “sweep” away or bring chastening darkness as judicial action; Begg’s reading emphasizes God’s active role in sending trial or judgment (distinct from endorsing moral evil), uses the verse to explain Saul’s internal turmoil as the outcome of divine action (punitive or purgative) and to contrast the absence of God’s Spirit (restlessness) with the rest and peace available in God’s restorative work.
Faith and Integrity Amidst Suffering: Lessons from Job(Desiring God) interprets Isaiah 45:7 within Job’s worldview to affirm the “goddness” of God — that Yahweh governs the cosmos such that both prosperity and calamity issue from his providence; the sermon argues this rules out cosmic dualism (two rival powers), treats calamity as within God’s governance (not as independent evil) and situates Job’s confidence to accept both good and bad as coherent with a biblical theology that attributes both kinds of events to the Most High for wise purposes.
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) (R.C. Sproul) reads Isaiah 45:7 as Hebrew poetry shaped by parallelism and insists the apparent claim “I create evil” must be understood as a contrastive poetic couplet where the Hebrew term rendered “evil” functions as “calamity/woe” (not moral evil); Sproul’s interpretation shifts the verse from an attribution of moral depravity to God toward a sober claim that God ordains blessings and calamities in history, with the semantic nuance revealed by recognizing Hebrew poetic form and lexical range.
Isaiah 45:7 Theological Themes:
Understanding Levirate Marriage and God's Sovereignty(David Guzik) brings out the unusual ethical-teleological theme that God allows evil not as an end in itself but because redeemed persons — those formed through permitted suffering and redemption — are in a qualitative sense greater than pre-fall innocence, so suffering is integrated into God’s higher creative/redemptive project rather than being an inexplicable byproduct.
Saul and David: The Power of God's Spirit(Alistair Begg) emphasizes a theological theme of chastening-as-divine-action: calamity or demonic torment can function as judicial/purging action from God to achieve ends (discipline, exposure), and the sermon links this to pastoral concerns about restlessness and the absence of God’s Spirit as the central spiritual malady — a theme that treats divine darkness as corrective rather than arbitrary.
Faith and Integrity Amidst Suffering: Lessons from Job(Desiring God) advances the theme of “goddness” (God’s comprehensive sovereignty) as an interpretive key: theological stability comes from confessing that good and bad come “from the mouth of the Most High,” which reframes suffering as subordinated to divine wisdom and so undercuts any theodicy that posits independent cosmic forces.
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) foregrounds a hermeneutical-theological theme: sound doctrine about God and evil must be grounded in correct literary and lexical exegesis (here, recognizing Hebrew parallelism and the semantic range of the Hebrew words translated “evil”), and theological claims (e.g., “God never creates evil”) should be preserved by attending to poetic form and translation nuance.
Isaiah 45:7 Historical and Contextual Insights:
Faith and Integrity Amidst Suffering: Lessons from Job(Desiring God) situates Isaiah 45:7 in the wider ancient Near Eastern/theophanic worldview Job embodies, noting Job’s intuitive knowledge that God alone governs calamity and blessing and linking that to prophetic material (the speaker even indicates how later prophetic texts — e.g., Amos — reflect the same conviction), thereby showing that the biblical authors operate within an Israelite cultural-historical framework that expects divine causality for national and personal disasters.
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) provides detailed historical-literary context about Hebrew poetic practice, explaining synonymous, antithetic, and synthetic parallelism as dominant features of Old Testament poetry and wisdom literature and showing how awareness of that rhetorical/historical-poetic form changes the translation and meaning of Isaiah 45:7 (so that “create evil” is read in the cultural/linguistic matrix as “bring calamity/woe”).
Isaiah 45:7 Cross-References in the Bible:
Saul and David: The Power of God's Spirit(Alistair Begg) weaves Isaiah 45:7 into a network of texts to explain God’s action: he connects the verse’s idea of God bringing darkness/calamity to the narrative in 1 Samuel where a harmful spirit troubles Saul (used as a concrete instance of divine permission/judgment), and he draws on later-theological echoes — Zechariah 4:6 (“Not by might, but by my Spirit”) to insist that restoration and true rest come by God’s Spirit, and on Jesus’ invitation (Matthew 11:28 “Come to me… and I will give you rest”) to pivot from Yahweh’s sovereign decrees to Christ’s restorative lordship.
Faith and Integrity Amidst Suffering: Lessons from Job(Desiring God) explicitly cites and harmonizes Isaiah 45:7 with other Old Testament texts (Amos’ rhetorical question about whether disaster comes to a city apart from the Lord, Lamentations 3:38’s “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both good and bad come?”) to argue for a consistent biblical motif that God controls both blessings and calamities and thus to rebut dualistic readings that separate moral evil from divine providence.
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) uses parallel biblical examples to teach the exegetical tool applied to Isaiah 45:7: Sproul points to Proverbs (e.g., Proverbs 19:5) and New Testament parallels (e.g., Matthew 7:7’s triplet “ask/seek/knock”) as paradigms of Hebrew/Poetic parallelism, then shows how recognizing the pattern in Isaiah reframes “I create evil” into the proper antonymic/correlative reading of “I bring prosperity and calamity,” thereby resolving apparent contradiction with the doctrinal claim that God is not the author of moral evil.
Isaiah 45:7 Christian References outside the Bible:
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) explicitly invokes Dr. G. C. Berkouwer as a mentor figure and heuristic source for the theological axiom that Christians should never attribute moral evil to God; Sproul uses Berkouwer’s framing (the “Biblical a priori”) to motivate a hermeneutical rule that drives his reading of Isaiah 45:7 and to justify using literary form (parallelism) to avoid ascribing moral evil to God.
Isaiah 45:7 Illustrations from Secular Sources:
Unlocking Scripture: The Power of Parallelism and Law(Ligonier Ministries) uses secularly intelligible analogies — storms, hurricanes, and natural disasters — to differentiate “calamity” (natural or political disaster) from moral evil, arguing that readers commonly think “evil” here means moral depravity but that ordinary secular examples of hurricanes/tornadoes better illustrate the Hebrew semantic range (physical calamity/woe rather than ethical evil), thereby showing how a poor translation can create theological confusion.
Saul and David: The Power of God's Spirit(Alistair Begg) employs vivid, non-biblical illustration (a personal medical/hospital vignette and a musical-therapy anecdote) to make the experiential point behind the biblical scene: just as musical therapy and small human comforts can steady a troubled person, so in the narrative God provides means (David’s harp and the Spirit’s movement) that relieve the external symptoms of Saul’s torment; Begg uses that real-world picture to make the theological claim that God’s providential actions (including permitted calamity) have pastoral and restorative purposes.