Christianity Today October 29, 2026 7 min signal 2026-10-29

God’s Sovereignty Knows No Political Bounds

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Christianity Today

October 29, 2026

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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Zondervan Academic

As often in great music, just when things seem to be reaching a peak, there’s a new chord, or a sudden modulation, which disrupts what we expect. Or perhaps instruments we haven’t heard up to this point suddenly blare out a shocking new variation on the earlier themes. What’s the composer up to? How’s it going to work out? That’s the effect created by Isaiah 45.

## Into the Heart of Isaiah: The Meaning and Message of Isaiah 40-55

N. T. Wright (Author)

Zondervan

240 pages

$23.98

We can hardly be too surprised at the attitude of the Judaeans, both those in exile and those back in devastated Jerusalem. Put yourself in the shoes of a Judaean living in Babylon and hearing the prophet proclaim chapters 40–43. Forgiveness and freedom! It’s a grand dream. Everyone knew that once a great power had swallowed up another little kingdom, that was the end of the story. Why would mighty Babylon release its grip on pathetic little Judaea and their former leaders? Freedom is a nice dream but clearly a delusion.

The prophet persists. He will announce that, against all realistic expectations, the Judaean captives will indeed be going back home, and that they will indeed rebuild Jerusalem and the temple. In between all these things, as though to emphasize the sheer sovereignty of Israel’s God, the Creator, he will do all this in the most unexpected way: through the work of a chosen but highly unlikely Servant.

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We’ve already been told that that’s how God works—through humans he calls to fulfill his purposes. But this time, the God of surprises, the God who says that he is doing new things we haven’t imagined before, declares that he is going to do all this—overcoming Babylon and sending the Judaean captives home again—through a pagan king. Through Cyrus the Persian. Well now, we can hear Isaiah’s audience saying, We didn’t see that coming.

Cyrus is a cheerful polytheist, but the prophet reassures the shocked Judaeans that their God is indeed the one and only. It is he who, as in verse 7, is responsible both for the things we humans like and for the things we don’t. This is as strong a statement of divine sovereignty as anywhere in Scripture; though, in taking care with the verse, we should note that the word raʿ here doesn’t mean evil in the modern sense of “moral wickedness,” but rather the opposite of shalom.

Both good times and bad times, in other words, are in the hand of God.

One of the functions of this statement is to head off any suggestion that Cyrus and other pagan kings get their effective energy—whatever they are doing!—from their own gods.

But then we come down with a bump. As we see in Isaiah 45:9–13, the Judaean exiles don’t like this message. Perhaps they’ve become too comfortable in Babylon? Or perhaps, like the wilderness generation, they prefer the equivalent of slavery in Egypt to manna and quails on the long march home? Perhaps they simply object to the idea of a pagan king doing YHWH’s will. The idols they see every day have so compromised their faith that they can’t believe their own true God. (That, by the way, is a problem the church faces in every generation.)

So the prophet rebukes them. In verse 9, God is the potter and they are the clay; God is the parent and they are the child. Using the full grand title “the Holy One of Israel” in verse 11, God challenges them: Are you really going to question me about this? Look here (v. 12)—I am the Creator! YHWH himself made the earth and placed people on it, as well as making the heavens and filling them with stars, so if he now chooses Cyrus and gets him to free the captives and rebuild Jerusalem (v. 13), that’s his business. YHWH has put it into his heart, and Cyrus will do it all for free.

We are reminded of Proverbs 21:1: The king’s heart is like “a stream of water” in YHWH’s hand, and he turns it this way and that. That’s why the early Christians, living under hostile Roman rule, were instructed to pray for those in authority. Now, the prophet is telling the exiles to trust that YHWH knows what he’s doing. We all need that message now and then, not in order to justify or excuse wickedness but in order to inculcate humility.

The conclusion acknowledges that all this is a shock: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself” (45:15, NRSV). God is operating behind the scenes in ways for which nothing in Israel’s earlier history has prepared them. The idea of the world’s greatest monarch using his military power to rescue the Judaeans from exile, and telling them to rebuild the temple, was way beyond any precedent.

In a different register, think how the story of Cyrus finds some shadowy first-century equivalents.

Emperor Augustus in Rome lifts his little finger and there’s a worldwide census … and a young couple make their way to the royal town of Bethlehem.

Thirty or so years later, Tiberius Caesar appoints Pontius Pilate as governor, and Jesus tells him, to our dark astonishment, that God has indeed given him the power of life and death.

In Acts, Herod Agrippa II and the Roman governor Festus agree that Paul is innocent and could have been set free. Go figure.

This is unwelcome to some today. Some are so eager to stress the wickedness of modern empires that they want an overly bright either/or, where the only thing to say about rulers and empires is that they’re all wicked. Equally, some are all too eager to hail new political rulers in messianic terms. The first Christians would point us back to Isaiah 45 and talk about the potter and the clay.

God remains sovereign, but he is the God who hides himself. The fact that he can and does use pagan imperial authorities doesn’t mean that he approves of their motivations or policies. God’s world is more complicated than we like to think. We who live at a dangerous and confused moment in history need to read and re-read Isaiah 40–55, not just for our own comfort and direction—though that too, of course—but to be humbled again before the sovereignty of the God who, having made heaven and earth, has promised to bring them together in covenant faithfulness and new-creational fruitfulness.

Our task then, as ever, is to trust and obey. Like the ancient Judaeans, we are tempted to trust instead in idols—national, financial, military, erotic, whatever. How do you know, we might ask, that the situation we face isn’t a rerun of Isaiah 10, which describes God using the pagan power to punish his people but then punishing the pagans themselves for their arrogance?

At a time of social and political turbulence, it’s all too easy to lurch toward overly simple “solutions.” These are sometimes, alas, linked by popular speakers and writers with shallow and spurious readings of biblical prophecy. One of the telltale signs of that is when such would-be exposition leaves our own obstinacy, rebellion and idolatry unchallenged and allows us to avoid the hard work of thinking and acting with prayerful and critical wisdom.

So yes: Isaiah 45 is all about being prepared to acknowledge God’s previously unimagined plan at work in all sorts of ways. But he is still the God who, even when active in salvation, is hiding himself, as indeed he did when the Word became flesh and lived among us.

God can do whatever he wants. He can and does turn human ambition and arrogance to serve his praise. But the self-revelation, on the one hand, of the sovereign God, and the vocation, on the other, of the true Servant (for whom Cyrus is a kind of advance sketch, even if a distorted one), belong far closer together than anyone could have imagined.

N. T. Wright is an award-winning author, the former bishop of Durham, and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University.

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