2026 · Week 42 · Oct 12–18 · Isaiah 58–66
Isaiah 58–66: the fast that frees, the day He held back, and the Redeemer who comes to Zion
Jesus came home to Nazareth. On the Sabbath He stood up in the synagogue where He grew up, and they handed Him the scroll of Isaiah.
He found the place and read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” Then He rolled the scroll up, handed it back, and sat down. Every eye in the room was on Him.
“This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21).
A few minutes later, the same people who had watched Him grow up dragged Him to the edge of a cliff to throw Him off.
What happened in between is the key to this whole week. And it’s hiding in plain sight, in two small edits Jesus made to Isaiah while He read.
This week in the manual 1. Fasting builds spiritual power and blesses people in need — Isaiah 58:3–12 2. Honoring the Lord on the Sabbath brings joy — 58:13–14 3. Jesus Christ is my Savior and Redeemer — 59:9–21; 61:1–3; 63:7–9 4. “The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light” — 60; 62 5. Christ will reign on earth during the Millennium — 64:1–5; 65:17–25; 66
That’s the milk, and it’s good milk. Isaiah himself said the Lord teaches doctrine to “them that are weaned from the milk” (Isaiah 28:9). So this week we’ll keep the milk, all five headings, and drop some meat into the bowl.
Two edits Jesus made while He read
Open Isaiah 61:1–2 next to Luke 4:18–19. They don’t match. Jesus changed two things.
First, He added a line. In the middle of His reading is “to set at liberty them that are bruised.” That line isn’t in Isaiah 61. It comes from Isaiah 58:6, the chapter on fasting: “to let the oppressed go free.” Luke quotes from the Greek, so the English doesn’t match word for word, but the phrase is Isaiah 58’s. Jesus wove the fast chapter into His own announcement.
Second, He stopped early. Isaiah 61:2 reads: “To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus read the first half and closed the book. He left the day of vengeance unread.
One line of liberty added. One line of vengeance held back.
Then He told His hometown two stories. When famine hit Israel, Elijah was sent to a widow in Sidon, a foreigner. When Israel was full of lepers, Elisha healed Naaman the Syrian, a foreign general (Luke 4:25–27).
That’s when the room turned. “All they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up, and thrust him out of the city” (Luke 4:28–29).
Some scholars read the anger exactly this way: a town under Roman occupation expected the Messiah to bring vengeance on the nations. Instead He held the vengeance back and held up two Gentiles as the ones God helped. Grace for outsiders, judgment withheld. That’s an interpretation, but the text supports it.
Hold on to that unread line. It comes back before this lesson is over.
(The Chosen dramatizes the whole scene, the reading and the rejection, in Season 3, Episode 3, “Physician, Heal Yourself.” Watch it before class if you can.)
“Wherefore have we fasted?”
Isaiah 58 opens with people who are doing everything right.
“They seek me daily, and delight to know my ways… they take delight in approaching to God” (58:2).
They study. They ask about ordinances. They fast. And they’re upset because it isn’t working:
“Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? wherefore have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge?” (58:3)
The Lord answers plainly. On your fast day you still drive your workers. You fast “for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness” (58:3–4). You bow your head like a bulrush, but nothing inside you bends.
These people don’t have a knowledge problem. They have a heart problem.
Alma said it in one verse: “he that will harden his heart, the same receiveth the lesser portion of the word; and he that will not harden his heart, to him is given the greater portion of the word” (Alma 12:10). Same scriptures on both sides of that line. The only difference is the heart.
Isaiah 58 is a mirror. Before you read the rest of the chapter, it’s worth asking which fast you’ve been keeping.
Break every yoke
Then the Lord describes the fast He chooses:
“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house?” (58:6–7)
Four verbs: loose, undo, let go free, break. And every one of them runs in two directions.
| The Lord’s fast | What He can do in me | What I can do for someone else |
|---|---|---|
| Loose the bands | Loosen what binds me: a habit, a grudge, an addiction | Stop being the thing that binds someone else |
| Undo heavy burdens | Lighten what I’m carrying | Pick up part of what a neighbor is carrying |
| Let the oppressed go free | Free me from fear and shame | Stand up for the person being pushed down |
| Break every yoke | Break the patterns I can’t break alone | Refuse to put a yoke on anyone |
Amulek said the same thing in the Book of Mormon: you can pray all day, but “if ye turn away the needy, and the naked, and visit not the sick and afflicted… your prayer is vain, and availeth you nothing” (Alma 34:28).
The fast the Lord chooses doesn’t stop at an empty stomach. It turns outward.
Then
Now the promises, and notice that every one of them starts with then:
“Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily… Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry, and he shall say, Here I am.” (58:8–9)
Three words in that verse are worth knowing in Hebrew.
- “Break forth” is baqaʿ: to split open. The light doesn’t creep up; it splits the dark the way dawn does, in one stroke.
- “Health” is ʾărukah: the new flesh that grows back over a wound. Jeremiah uses the same word when the Lord promises, “I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds” (Jeremiah 30:17). Isaiah isn’t promising nothing will hurt. He’s promising the wound will close.
- “Speedily” is meherah: in haste.
And then the best promise in the chapter. Not the problem will go away. “Here I am.” The point of the fast is a Person who answers.
President Jeffrey R. Holland bore this witness in general conference in October 2014: “Truly, as Isaiah recorded, I have cried out in the fast more than once, and truly God has responded, ‘Here I am.'”
In 2020 the whole world tested this chapter. A prophet who had spent his first career as a heart surgeon, President Russell M. Nelson, called the world to fast for relief from a pandemic, and then to a second fast twelve days after the first. When he called the second fast, he quoted Isaiah 58:6 word for word. A microbiologist later charted what happened in the weeks that followed. The data is too unbelievable not to check it, and check it again. That story is its own article: A Prophet Who Was a Heart Surgeon Prescribed Two Worldwide Fasts Against COVID in 12 Days.
The repairer of the breach
Keep reading, and the chapter does something remarkable:
“And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.” (58:12)
Look at who’s doing the rebuilding. The same person who needed the yoke broken.
That’s the whole movement of Isaiah 58: the one being restored becomes the one who restores. The person who was freed becomes the person who frees. The healed wound becomes the hand that heals.
The Book of Mormon shows the same pattern. The humble “did fast and pray oft,” and grew stronger “even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their yielding their hearts unto God” (Helaman 3:35). And sometimes the Lord’s first answer isn’t removing the burden but strengthening the back: for Alma’s people, “the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease” (Mosiah 24:15). Deliverance came after.
I know this one from the inside.
I was seventeen, one of the youngest midshipmen at the Naval Academy, and I’d spent a couple of years drifting from what I’d been raised on. Then my best friend nearly died in a motorcycle accident, shortly before his mission. The priesthood blessing that healed him healed me, 2,104 miles away. It hit me that the things I’d inherited were true, and that my life had to change.
I didn’t just want to believe it. I needed to know it for myself: that Jesus is the Christ, that Joseph was His prophet, that the Book of Mormon happened. So I fasted for three days. Twice. In an upper attic at the Academy, the answer came. I don’t know how else to describe it except the way Alma did: a completely changed life. A new heart.
And that new heart I gave back to Him. He gave me a second chance. He has my heart to this day.
An honest heart. A broken heart. A new heart. Now I’m seeking the pure heart, and waiting on the greatest promise of all, the one the risen Lord gave the Nephites in His beatitudes: “Blessed are all the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (3 Nephi 12:8). He repeated it in our day: every soul who forsakes his sins, comes unto Him, calls on His name, obeys His voice, and keeps His commandments “shall see my face and know that I am” (D&C 93:1).
A delight, not a burden
The chapter ends with the Sabbath:
“If thou… call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable… Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth” (58:13–14).
The same heart surgeon who called the 2020 fasts gave the modern talk on this verse. In 2015, President Nelson told the Church that as a young man he had a list of Sabbath do’s and don’ts, until he found a better question: “What sign do I want to give to God?” His conclusion: “Faith in God engenders a love for the Sabbath; faith in the Sabbath engenders a love for God. A sacred Sabbath truly is a delight.”
So the surgeon-prophet stands at both ends of Isaiah 58: the Sabbath in 2015, the fast in 2020.
“Ride upon the high places of the earth” is worth a second look. The manual’s Scripture Helps reads the high places as sacred settings where we meet God. Avraham Gileadi reads it as ascent: those who come to delight in the Lord rise to higher spiritual levels. Both point the same direction: the fast and the Sabbath aren’t the destination. They’re the road up.
His hand is not shortened
Chapter 59 opens with the answer to 58:3’s complaint:
“Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: But your iniquities have separated between you and your God” (59:1–2).
He can reach us. The distance is on our side.
Then a verse the manual sends us to:
“And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him” (59:16).
When no one else could stand in the gap, the Lord stood in it Himself. Jesus Christ is the Intercessor, the Mediator, the One who brings salvation when no one else can.
For your codebook, verse 19 puts Isaiah’s two great forces into a single line: “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him.” You’ve met the flood before: in Isaiah 8:7, the flood is “the king of Assyria, and all his glory.” You’ve met the standard too: the ensign the Lord raises to gather His people (11:12; 49:22). Avraham Gileadi reads that ensign as the Lord’s servant, the one Isaiah keeps hidden. The flood and the ensign, the Assyrian and the Servant, in the same verse. The Servant is the Lord’s instrument, not the Lord. Christ alone is the Redeemer.
And then the line that names this whole week:
“And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob” (59:20).
Arise, shine
“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee… And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.” (60:1, 3)
Isaiah 60 and 62 are about a people who become light and a city the nations come to. Isaiah says it plainly: the Lord will be “an everlasting light” (60:19), and He sets “watchmen upon thy walls” who don’t go quiet “day nor night” (62:6).
Two chunks of meat here.
Isaiah tells us how Zion gets fed. “Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck the breast of kings” (60:16). The nations nurse the covenant people. He said the same in 49:23: kings shall be “thy nursing fathers.” So there’s the milk again: the Gentiles are meant to nourish Zion.
And Zion has an address. The Tenth Article of Faith: Zion, the New Jerusalem, “will be built upon the American continent.” If you’ve been with us since September, you know we read Egypt in Isaiah as America, the great nation the covenant people lean on instead of the Lord. That’s our interpretation, and we’ve labeled it that way from the start. But notice the other side: scripture says the same continent will hold Zion. One land, two possible roles. Which one it plays depends on whether its people turn to the Lord.
Beauty for ashes
Now go back to the verse Jesus read in Nazareth:
“To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD… To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (61:2–3).
“The acceptable year of the LORD” points back to the Jubilee. Every fiftieth year, a ram’s horn sounded on the Day of Atonement and liberty was proclaimed: servants set free, land returned to the families who had lost it. When Jesus read that line and said “This day,” He was announcing the great Jubilee in His own person.
(One more chunk, and it’s our interpretation: America’s 250th anniversary this year is five fifty-year cycles, five Jubilees. That’s the heart of our Covenant Hypothesis. The pattern is visible; what it means is something to test, not something we proclaim.)
“Beauty for ashes” is lovelier in Hebrew. The word for beauty is a headdress, a crown. People in mourning put ashes on their heads. The Lord takes the ashes off and puts a crown in their place.
He held it. Here it is.
Remember the line Jesus didn’t read in Nazareth? “And the day of vengeance of our God.”
Turn to Isaiah 63:
“Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?… I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save… I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me… and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments.” (63:1, 3)
Read it in order. The verse explains its own red: the Lord coming in judgment, treading the wicked like grapes. The Doctrine and Covenants places this scene at His Second Coming, when He appears in red apparel (D&C 133:46–51). Elder Neal A. Maxwell taught that the red can also remind us of Gethsemane and Calvary, where He bled for us first.
And then the line we’ve been waiting for:
“For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.” (63:4)
There it is. The half of Isaiah 61:2 that Jesus left unread in Nazareth.
He didn’t delete the day of vengeance. He held it. He told His disciples, “the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” (Luke 9:56). Paul said it with Isaiah’s own words: “now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). Near the end of His ministry, speaking of Jerusalem, Jesus did speak of “the days of vengeance” (Luke 21:22). The acceptable year came first. The day of vengeance is still in His heart.
That’s the order of the scriptures, not a calendar. Mercy came first, and it’s still the season of mercy.
Then Isaiah turns tender:
“I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD… In all their affliction he was afflicted… in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.” (63:7, 9)
“Lovingkindnesses” is hesed, covenant love: loyal, stubborn love that keeps its promises. The same Lord in red apparel is the One who was afflicted in all their afflictions and carried them.
The potter
The people respond with one of the most honest prayers in scripture. It runs from 63:15 into chapter 64: “Look down from heaven… Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down.” They admit “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (64:6). And then they say the thing that changes everything:
“But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.” (64:8)
That’s what a yielded heart sounds like. Clay doesn’t shape itself. It stays soft in the potter’s hand.
Paul loved verse 4 enough to quote it: “neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee, what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him” (64:4; see 1 Corinthians 2:9). Waiting on the Lord, President M. Russell Ballard taught, isn’t sitting in a waiting room. It’s acting in faith while He works.
“Cast you out for my name’s sake”
Near the very end, Isaiah describes the person the Lord looks for:
“To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word.” (66:2)
Then a hard verse:
“Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word; Your brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name’s sake, said, Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they shall be ashamed.” (66:5)
Cast out by their own brethren. Avraham Gileadi reads these brethren as religious people inside the covenant community who feel threatened by the zeal of those who tremble at the word, and who push them out, until the Lord reverses the shame.
Scripture shows that pattern again and again. Lehi was mocked and hunted in Jerusalem (1 Nephi 1:19–20). A healed blind man was cast out of the synagogue (John 9:34). And go back to the start of this lesson: Nazareth “rose up, and thrust him out of the city” (Luke 4:29). The scene we opened with is Isaiah 66:5.
But Isaiah gives us a guard before we use this verse on anyone else. In 58:9 the Lord tells us to put away “the putting forth of the finger.” So read 66:5 as a mirror before it becomes a window. The first question isn’t who’s casting me out? It’s could I be the brother who casts out?
New heavens and a new earth
The book ends with the world He will heal:
“For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.” (65:17)
“Before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear… They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.” (65:24–25)
Notice 65:24. In Isaiah 58 the promise was call, and He’ll answer. In the Millennium He answers before we call.
And the last image of comfort in Isaiah is a mother: “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you” (66:13). Isaiah even ends where this lesson began, with milk: “that ye may suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her consolations” (66:11).
Where this lands
Isaiah 58 is a mirror and a promise.
The mirror: we can do everything right and still keep the wrong fast. Knowledge isn’t the gate. The heart is.
The promise: turn the fast outward, and He says “Here I am.” The light breaks. The wound closes. And the one being restored becomes the one who restores.
Jesus read that work aloud as His own in Nazareth, with Isaiah 58 woven right into it. He held the day of vengeance back, because this is still the season of mercy.
I know He answers the fast. I know He changes hearts, because He changed mine in an attic at seventeen. I know He’s the Redeemer who comes to Zion, and that everything He does carries us back to His Father.
Fast Sunday is November 1. Before it, try three things:
- Read Isaiah 58 the night before. All fourteen verses. Notice how much of it is about other people.
- Bring one bond to Christ you can’t break yourself, and lift one burden for someone else.
- Write it down. What you asked for, and when. Then watch for the answer.
“Search these things diligently; for great are the words of Isaiah.” — 3 Nephi 23:1
Search. Not read.
Next week
Jeremiah. The manual moves on, but Isaiah doesn’t leave us. The road to 3 Nephi 23 runs two more years.
And look what’s waiting in Jeremiah 18. The prophet goes down to the potter’s house and watches clay being reshaped, and the Lord says: “As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel” (Jeremiah 18:6).
Isaiah 64:8 ends this week with the clay. Jeremiah picks it right back up.
Ken Krogue is the founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply studying Isaiah for more than ten years.
