ISAIAH 65:17-25

Q: In describing the “New Heavens and Earth,” as it is titled, Isaiah proclaims “he who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth, he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed.” I have always understood this New Heaven and Earth referring to the final, eternal heaven and earth. This passage seems to imply there will still be death and sin (accursed?) in this new heaven and earth. Can you please explain?

This is a great passage to demonstrate how those with different theologies of the future look at scripture through different lenses.

A postmillennial understanding of Isaiah 65 is that (1) it refers to all mankind, not just the Jewish people and (2) it refers to the time period right before Christ comes again to usher in the eternal heaven and earth. Their belief is an optimistic view of the future in which the Gospel will eventually spread to all people accompanied by great advances in science and medicine. At a certain point of time, disease will have been mostly conquered and the universal influence of the Holy Spirit will result in peace on earth. Thus, when Christ comes, there will be little difference between the eternal kingdom he institutes and that already existing on earth. This interpretation takes Isaiah 65 as mostly literal except for the reference in verse 25 to all animals living in peace with one another. They would probably take this as a poetic way of describing a world in ecological balance at last.

A dispensational premillennialist understands these verses in a strictly literal manner and applies them mainly to the Jewish people living during the 1,000-year period (The Millennium) occurring after the Tribulation and before the ushering in of the New Heavens and New Earth. During this period, Christ will reign from his throne in Jerusalem, which will be the governmental and spiritual capital of the world and where animal sacrifices will be resumed. The earth will be populated by a mixture of resurrected OT and NT saints, those believers who never died but were taken up into heaven during the Tribulation, and normal human beings who can still sin and die (but only at an advanced age). To truly comprehend all the many details associated with this viewpoint, it is probably best to refer you to the writings of John Walvoord, especially The Millennial Kingdom.

Historical premillennialists share the basic chronological scheme of the future with the dispensationalists but with major differences in emphasis. They usually see the prophecies in Isaiah as referring to the New Israel, the church. Ethnic Jews may have some unspecified role to play during the millennial period (which may or may not last exactly 1,000 years), but it falls short of temple worship being resumed. They also realize that this passage in Isaiah is written in poetry, not prose. Therefore it should not be taken as a literal description of conditions during this time.

Lastly (but not least), one way in which some, but not all, amillennialists read this passage is as a strictly poetic prophecy of a future glorious Israel which was, however, strictly contingent on the repentance of the nation of Israel and their acceptance of the Messiah when he came-- neither of which occurred. Therefore this is a future which Israel as a nation did not, and will not, inherit.

Each of these basic approaches has its strengths and weaknesses and avoids the problem you point out by denying that it describes the New Heaven and New Earth at all. If anyone is interested in pursuing this subject, I would suggest reading The Meaning of the Millennium (Robert G. Clouse, ed.) in which four scholars representing the views above are allowed to state their case in turn and get critiqued by the other four writers.

There remains the majority view among evangelical scholars, who feel that this passage does refer to the New Heaven and New Earth. After all, much of Revelation 21-22 describing the eternal state is practically a paraphrase of the last half of Isaiah 65. How do those scholars then explain the apparent presence of sin and death?

The presence of sin is perhaps the easiest issue to deal with since all commentators agree that the last half of verse 20 dealing with one who is cursed is extremely hard to translate from Hebrew to English. Neither NIV or NRSV uses the phrase “sinner” to describe the one who fails to reach 100 years, and John McKenzie (Second Isaiah, p. 199) states, “No one will die such a premature death unless he is a sinner and therefore under a curse. The line is paradoxical; the New Jerusalem will have no sinners in it.”

But what about the apparent presence of death in the New Heaven and New Earth? Derek Kidner (New Bible Commentary, p. 624) explains that in these verses “The new is portrayed wholly in terms of the old...(It) depicts the final state by means of earthly analogies...all this is expressed freely, locally and pictorially, to kindle hope rather than feed curiosity.” This does not mean that Isaiah did not believe in everlasting life for the saved, however:

“He will swallow up death forever.” (Isaiah 25:8)

“Your dead shall rise, their corpses shall rise.” (Isaiah 26:19)

Quoting McKenzie again, he refers to Isaiah 65:22, which describes the life of a person in the New Earth to be like that of a tree and compares it to Job 14:7-9 in which the days of a man are said to not be like the days of a tree: “A tree can live on even if it has been cut down. It enjoys a kind of immortality in comparison with man.”

John N. Oswalt (The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 40-66, p. 658-9) takes another approach to explain why there is no contradiction between Isaiah 65 and Isaiah's references to immortality in 25:8 and 26:19. The examples in Isaiah 65:20-25 should be read in the context of verse 19, which states that there will be no more weeping in the New Earth. These passages “simply illustrate all those things that cause sorrow, and they are used to show that such conditions will not exist in the new heavens and earth.”