Isa 52 | EE | STEP | Awake, awake, Zion! Put on strength like you put on clothes. Put on your beautiful clothes, Jerusalem, the holy city. People who are not God’s people will not come into you again.

Isaiah 52

1 Awake, awake, Zion! Put on strength like you put on clothes. Put on your beautiful clothes, Jerusalem, the holy city. People who are not God’s people will not come into you again. ^{▼▼52:1 ‘People who are not God’s people’. Isaiah wrote ‘people who are not clean’. Here it means ‘not clean like God is clean’. That was because they met people like the people from Babylon. Those people did not love the LORD God.}

2 Remove the dirt from yourselves. Get up and sit on your special high seat, (Jerusalem). Make yourself free from the chains round your neck, Daughter of Zion (Jerusalem) who is now like a prisoner.

3 Do that because the LORD says, ‘You sold yourselves for nothing, and I will redeem you without money.’ 4 And the LORD God says, ‘Firstly, my people went down to live in Egypt. Then, not a long time ago, Assyria was cruel to them. 5 And now, this is what I have got here’, says the LORD. He says, ‘An enemy took my people away for nothing. And the rulers of my people are crying. And for all of every day enemies continue to say bad things about me. 6 So, my people will know my name. So, in that day, my people will know this. I said what would happen. Yes, I said it!’

7 The feet of the people who bring good news will be beautiful. They will be beautiful while they run on the mountains. The people who bring good news will tell you, ‘There is no war and there is no danger.’ They will say to Zion, ‘Your God rules as king!’

8 Listen! The men who watch over your city are saying something. They are so happy that they are all shouting together. When the LORD returns to Zion, they will see it with their own eyes.

9 Sing aloud together, you places in Jerusalem that the enemy destroyed. Do that because the LORD has made his people happy again. He has redeemed Jerusalem.

10 The LORD has made his holy arm bare. He has done it in front of the eyes of the people in every country. Now, all parts of the earth can see that our God makes people safe.

11 Leave! Leave! Go out from there. Do not touch anything that is not clean. Go out from inside it! Those people who will carry the LORD‘s special things, be clean!

12 But you will not go out quickly, or hurry away. That is because the LORD will go in front of you. And the God of Israel will be like an army behind you.

The Fourth Song about the Servant

13 Look! Everything that my servant says will be good. It will be right. I will raise him up and I will lift him up to an important place. And I will make him very important.

14 They hit his body, so that it did not seem like the body of a man. They changed his shape, so that it was not like the shape of any human person. And when many people looked at him, they felt sick.

15 But he will surprise the people in many countries! Kings will shut their mouths because of him. Here are the reasons:

· They will see things that nobody told them about.

· And they will understand things that they have not heard about.