4:1  Seven women will take hold of one man in that day, and say, We will eat our own food, wear our own clothes, only let us be called by your name—take away our reproach!

meaning that they have enough. Which shows you immediately that these are righteous women who are not under the covenant curse. Because the other guy, in chapter three, said there is neither food nor clothing in my house; you cannot make me a leader of the people.  So this is a different category of people. The seven have another meaning. Well, it’s always a number that implies multiplicity, like seven times seven, or seventy times seven, things like that. It could be six or it could be eight. He’s not so literal; you never take him totally literally like that, saying it has to be seven. No, it does not. The point is that this is kind of a phenomenon. If it would say many women take hold of one man, that would leave it totally up to speculation.

So, these have enough food to eat and enough clothes to wear. They’re not going to burden their husbands with that. Only, let us be called by your name. Take away our reproach. That is, in other words, marry me because my reproach is that I’m not fulfilling the measure of my creation by raising up children to God. So let me be called by your name; I’ll be your wife. Now, what kind of man do they approach? Any old man? No they don’t. Isaiah identifies exactly what kind of man that they go to and say that to. They’ve already had experience with the other men that have been killed by the sword.

4:2  In that day the plant of the Lord shall be beautiful and glorious, and the earth’s fruit the pride and glory of the survivors of Israel.

So there it’s identifying survivors. We saw survivors of Sodom and Gomorrah, earlier. People of Zion were like those who survived the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And we’ll see that again and again. Now, the plant of the Lord is another metaphor identifying the Lord’s Servant, here, and in other places of the Hebrew prophets. The Lord’s Servant is a plant of the Lord. And He’s paralleled with the earth’s fruit, the first fruits of the earth, as it were, in the Millennium. This is a Millennial context. These are all those who have survived the destruction, in that day, the day of judgment. They will be beautiful and glorious because of their righteousness. They’ll not be ignominious like the men and the women who had done evil. These will be exalted, the survivors of Israel.

4:3  Then shall they who are left in Zion and they who remain in Jerusalem be called holy—all who were inscribed to be among the living at Jerusalem.

There’s that word, left, again, which identifies survivors, or a remnant that survives, or that remains. To be called holy “ Then shall they who are left in Zion and they who remain in Jerusalem be called holy. These are the survivors of Israel. Not all Israel is spared. But only the category called Zion or Jerusalem are spared. Zion, in Isaiah, is both a people and a place. It is those who repent, as we saw earlier in chapter one, verse twenty-seven “those of Israel who repent. It is also a safe place, as in this chapter, verse five. It’s a place of safety and protection. It is a place to which those who repent return home. In Hebrew, the word for repent is the same as return. Those who repent of sins and are forgiven also return, physically. They spiritually return, but they also physically return. They return home from exile, from the dispersion, from scattering, to Zion, in an exodus.

Who are they? The holy ones; they’ll be called holy, or saints, or sanctified ones. Like the Holy One of Israel, the Sanctified One of Israel, the Saint of Israel, whichever way you want to translate it. So are these, holy, like he is holy. Then shall they who are left in Zion and they who remain in Jerusalem be called holy, all who inscribed to among the live at Jerusalem. In other words, not among the dead. Their names are inscribed. Their names are written in the book of Life. We would say the Lamb’s Book of Life. So those who physically survive that day are those who spiritually qualify. Those are the ones whom the seven women take hold of.
This shall be when my Lord has washed away the excrement of the women of Zion. What’s the excrement of the women of Zion? All that finery and all that stuff of theirs that was a stumbling block to themselves and to the men that caused the breakdown of society, in fact. It seems to be that when the women capitulate, finally. The men always do so anyway. But when the women do, that’s the end. This is the way he structured this, here.

4:4  This shall be when my Lord has washed away the excrement of the women of Zion and cleansed Jerusalem of its bloodshed, in the spirit of justice, by a burning wind.

There we have the sin of the women and the sin of the men, both. In a spirit of justice, by a burning wind. There we have justice, again. No mercy, just justice. Why? For those who didn’t repent. Those who didn’t repent cannot come under the law of mercy, so they have to come under the law of justice and suffer all these calamities.
Concerning the burning wind,  remember, when we have storm imagery like that, in the book of Isaiah, as we do in this chapter four, it implies a day of judgment. You also find in other chapters where the storm comes, with the lightnings and the thunders and they beat upon that house that stands upon the Rock. It will stand, right? That storm imagery is directly related to the day of judgment in the book of Isaiah, and in the other Hebrew prophets. The burning is done by the king of Assyria, all through Isaiah. Those who survive that will survive the cleansing that’s coming, the cleansing of the wicked .

4:5  Over the whole site of Mount Zion, and over its solemn assembly, the Lord will form a cloud by day and a mist glowing with fire by night: above all that is glorious shall be a canopy.

There, Zion is a place, a place of protection. For who? For those who participate in the solemn assembly. In other words, for the righteous. Anciently we had in Moses’ organization, the people, in general, and we had the congregation within that the holy of holies within the tabernacle. We had physical degrees of access to God, or the lack thereof, representing actual spiritual categories of people. And so it is here. This represents a category of people, those who participate in a solemn assembly, who have access to God.

Over the whole site of Mount Zion, and over its solemn assembly, the Lord will form a cloud by day and a mist glowing with fire by night. It’s what we called a cloud of glory which signifies the Lord’s presence with his people. Anciently that cloud of glory accompanied the Israelites on their exodus from the land of Egypt through the Sinai wilderness until, eventually, they came to the Promised land. And when Solomon built a temple it stood upon the temple, signifying the Lord’s presence in the temple. Whether it did so, continually, all of the time, I’m not sure, but it certainly did so a lot of the time.

When a Jew gets married, the man and the woman stand underneath the canopy. You’ve seen it in the movie, Fiddler on the Roof. That canopy symbolizes the presence of the Lord with them. He’s the third partner in the marriage. It is a partnership with God, as well as with themselves. Above all that is glorious shall be a canopy. There’s the word, canopy, and that canopy refers to the cloud of glory, but also to the idea of a marriage canopy. So, when it says, over the whole site of Mount Zion, and over its solemn assembly, the Lord will form a cloud by day and a mist glowing with fire by night, above all that is glorious shall be a canopy, what’s he saying? He’s saying at that time, when that solemn assembly takes place, or that collection of people in the exodus, we learned elsewhere, gathered to this safe place, and Zion, assembly there, what do they do? Just stand around? They renew the covenant with the Lord, the marriage. They re-establish their covenant with God. Perhaps even before they come they do that, on one level. But certainly at that time.

In Isaiah’s scenario the Lord makes a covenant with his people, after the destruction, a new covenant that embodies all the positive features of the former covenant that the Lord has made with his people, or with individuals. It could be a reference to that covenant, but certainly the idea of a canopy implies, not only protection, as in this case, but also the renewal of the covenant between the Lord and his people, whatever form that may take.
A cloud by day and a mist glowing with fire, by night. What happened, anciently, when the cloud covered the Israelites was that the Egyptians could not penetrate the cloud to harm the Israelites. Nor could the Israelites go through the cloud to the Egyptians. It served as a barrier between the two.

4:6  It shall be a shelter and shade from the heat of the day, a secret refuge from the downpour and from rain.

What will be? The canopy. What canopy? The cloud of glory. It’s going to be a shelter, and a shade from the heat of the day. You remember the Watchman’s hut, the shelter in the vineyard that we saw earlier? This is it. That’s a word link to this verse. That’s the shelter. That’s how we get survivors. It talked about survivors, there, too, didn’t it? Had not the Lord of Hosts left us a few survivors, it says in chapter one, verse nine. It talks about the shelter and the vineyard in chapter one, verse eight. There’s some word links there, in chapter four, aren’t there? So we get more of an idea, now, just how that protection is going to happen during that time. I suppose that if you were covered by the cloud of glory you’d be invisible even from the air, wouldn’t you? You’d be protected from the outside, and this kind of outlines how God intervenes to protect his righteous people. This is direct, Divine, intervention. This is not just protection by defending yourselves against your enemies, like the people did under Moses. Sometimes when they fought the wars conquering the Promised Land and the nations of Canaan that were in a state of wickedness they fought against them. This is not like that. That was protection, also. But here it’s direct protection by Divine intervention. The Lord is actually there.

The heat of the day, as in a shelter and shade from the heat of the day, the day is the day of judgment, and the heat is the day of burning, as in a Sodom and Gomorrah heat, a fiery destruction of the wicked, in which the righteous survive. Now, also later on, we’ll see the words, shelter and shade, used in another sense where people rely upon Pharaoh and his armies as a shade and shelter. In chapters thirty and thirty-one, Pharaoh, king of Egypt, provides a shelter and shade, because he has vast forces of chariots and horsemen, and the smaller nations of the world look for protection from Pharaoh and his armies against Assyria. But that’s an arm of flesh. And the arm of flesh does not provide shelter, in the end. It’s a false shelter. So, those terms have a good connotation and an evil connotation. This is the Lord’s shelter which is the true shelter.

The secret refuge from the downpour and from rain, like I said, will not even be visible to others. The downpour and rain is, again, storm imagery. In this case it would be a Sodom and Gomorrah type of downpour, a rain of fire and brimstone from the sky or some equivalent. It’s an allegory. All through the book of Isaiah, Isaiah uses storm imagery to identify the king of Assyria’s [rest of words cut off from recording.]