Line upon Line

The Arm of the Lord

The arm that brought Israel out of Egypt, followed through Isaiah and into latter-day scripture.

“An arm is a symbol of power.”1 In Isaiah the Lord’s arm is His “instrument of deliverance and judgment,”2 and it has a story. The arm of the exodus is promised again, called on to wake, made bare before the nations, asked about beside the suffering servant, and found working alone. Scripture and the Church read several of these passages of Jesus Christ.

Step Passage The words
The exodus Ex. 6:6 “I will redeem you with a stretched out arm”
Prayed for Isa. 33:2 “be thou their arm every morning”
Promised Isa. 40:10–11 “his arm shall rule for him… he shall gather the lambs with his arm”
Called on Isa. 51:9 “Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD”
Made bare Isa. 52:10 “The LORD hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations”
Asked about Isa. 53:1 “to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?”
Alone Isa. 59:16; Isa. 63:5 “there was no man… therefore his arm brought salvation unto him”
Still to come D&C 133:3 “he shall make bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations”

From the exodus to the promise

The arm is first the arm of the exodus: “by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm” (Deut. 4:34). Isaiah recalls it twice, as the arm that “dried the sea” (Isa. 51:10) and that led Israel “dividing the water before them” (Isa. 63:12). When he promises it again, the arm that rules also gathers lambs (Isa. 40:10–11), and the Lord says, “on mine arm shall they trust” (Isa. 51:5), in a passage whose verses “bear strong witness that Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, is the same person as Jesus Christ of the New.”3

Called on, and made bare

In Isa. 51:9 the arm itself is told to awake. The verse does not say who is speaking, and it is read two ways: as the Lord’s people “pleading with the Lord to ‘awake,’”4 or as a call “from God to His latter-day children.”3 The same call is then turned on Jerusalem (Isa. 51:17) and Zion (Isa. 52:1); the pages for Isaiah 51 and Isaiah 52 follow all three.

Then the announcement: “The LORD hath made bare his holy arm” (Isa. 52:10). The picture is probably a warrior who makes “bare his right arm up to the shoulder, that he may fight without encumbrance,”5 and it means “to reveal His strength and power.”6

Who has believed?

The next time the arm is named, it is a question: “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?” (Isa. 53:1). The servant has just been introduced (Isa. 52:13–14), and what follows is a man “despised and rejected of men” (Isa. 53:3).

John says the verse was fulfilled when people saw Jesus’s miracles, “yet they believed not on him” (John 12:37–38). Abinadi, asked what Isaiah 52:7–10 means (Mosiah 12:20–24), answers that “God himself should come down among the children of men” (Mosiah 13:34) and then quotes all of Isaiah 53, beginning with this question (Mosiah 14:1).

Latter-day Saint writers differ on what “the arm” is here. It “is often interpreted to mean that the arm of the Lord is revealed in the being of the mortal Messiah”; others take the question as “To whom is the power or might of the Lord revealed?”7 The pages for Isaiah 53 and the Servant Songs take up the song itself.

Alone

Twice the Lord looks for help and finds none: “he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him” (Isa. 59:16); “I looked, and there was none to help… therefore mine own arm brought salvation unto me” (Isa. 63:5). The first passage “refers to Jesus Christ, our intercessor with the Father.”8 The second belongs to the scene of the winepress, and Isaiah “prophesied that when Jesus Christ comes again, He will be ‘red in [His] apparel’”:6 “I have trodden the wine-press alone… and none were with me” (D&C 133:50).

Jesus Christ speaks of His own arm: “mine arm of mercy is extended towards you” (3 Ne. 9:14); “Jesus Christ, your Redeemer, the Great I Am, whose arm of mercy hath atoned for your sins” (D&C 29:1).

Still to be revealed

Restoration scripture uses Isaiah’s words for what is still ahead. “The Lord God will proceed to make bare his arm in the eyes of all the nations, in bringing about his covenants and his gospel unto those who are of the house of Israel” (1 Ne. 22:11). The risen Savior quotes Isa. 52:10 as “The Father hath made bare his holy arm… and the Father and I are one” (3 Ne. 20:35). The same words in D&C 133:3 “may refer to the power and glory that will be manifested at Jesus Christ’s Second Coming,” and “may also refer to the Lord’s great latter-day work of gathering Israel.”6

Sources

  1. Chapter 6: 1 Nephi 19–22, Book of Mormon Student Manual (Church Educational System, 2009). ↩
  2. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. ↩
  3. Chapter 17: The Gathering of Israel and the Coming of the Messiah (Isaiah 48–54), Old Testament Student Manual: 1 Kings–Malachi (2003). ↩ ↩
  4. Lesson 130: Isaiah 51–52, Old Testament Seminary Teacher Material (2018). ↩
  5. Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Prophecies of Isaiah, Trans. James Martin. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; in Keil and Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, online at Bible Hub. ↩
  6. Chapter 53: Doctrine and Covenants 133, Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (2017). ↩ ↩ ↩
  7. Donald W. Parry and John W. Welch, eds., Isaiah in the Book of Mormon, Provo, UT: FARMS and Deseret Book, 1998, p. 496. ↩
  8. Chapter 18: The Last Days and the Millennium (Isaiah 55–66), Old Testament Student Manual: 1 Kings–Malachi (2003). ↩