"Thus says Jehovah,/In an acceptable time I have answered You,/And in a day of salvation I have helped You; / And I will preserve You and give You for a covenant of the people,/To restore the land, to apportion the desolate inheritances,/To say to the prisoners, Come forth,/To say to those who are in darkness, Show yourselves" (vv. 8-9a). Here we see that Christ as the Servant of Jehovah has been given as a covenant of the people. A covenant is a signed agreement between two parties, in which promises are made. A covenant becomes a will upon the death of the covenanting party. In a will someone may promise to give all his riches to another person. The will becomes the title deed of all those riches. But if there are no actual riches to receive, the will is meaningless. Christ is our will, our covenant, and He is all the riches given to us in the will. The Bible is a will that mentions many wonderful items that are to be our portion. But without Christ as the reality, the Bible would be only empty pages. Christ is the reality of the items given as bequests in the Bible.
Christ is given as a covenant to restore the land. To restore the land is to accomplish something of God's economy concerning His kingdom. The restoring of the land is mainly for the kingdom of God, which will eventually consummate in the New Jerusalem in the new heaven and new earth.
In our experience of Christ today, to restore the land means to have the land enlarged or expanded. Christ is the land. To experience Christ as the expanding land is to occupy Christ as the land for the building up of God's kingdom that His temple, His testimony, may be established. If we have only the Bible but lack the experience of Christ as the reality, we do not have the feeling that Christ as the land is expanding. But if we have the Bible with the experiences of Christ, we sense that Christ as the land is expanding. The more we experience Christ, the more we sense that Christ is expanding within us. The more we experience Christ in this way, the more God's kingdom is established with God's temple as His testimony.
Isaiah 49:9b-13 speaks of the blessed return of the captives. Because Christ has become a covenant for the people of Israel, the captives will return.
The captives will feed along the roads, and their pasture will be on all the bare heights. They will not hunger or thirst, neither the scorching heat nor the sun will strike them; for He who has compassion on them will lead them and will guide them beside the springs of water (vv. 9b-10). Today the Lord not only leads us in a general way but also guides us in a specific way.
In verse 11 Jehovah says, "I will make all My mountains into a road,/And My highways will be raised up." We may apply this in a spiritual way to our experience. Before we returned to the Lord, we were lost, and we did not know where we were or where we should be. But when we returned to the Lord, immediately there were roads and highways, and we knew what to do and where to go.