17 So wake up! Rub the sleep from your eyes! Up on your feet, Jerusalem! You've drunk the cup God handed you, the strong drink of his anger. You drank it down to the last drop, staggered and collapsed, dead-drunk. 18 And nobody to help you home, no one among your friends or children to take you by the hand and put you in bed. 19 You've been hit with a double dose of trouble - does anyone care? Assault and battery, hunger and death - will anyone comfort? 20 Your sons and daughters have passed out, strewn in the streets like stunned rabbits, Sleeping off the strong drink of God's anger, the rage of your God. 21 Therefore listen, please, you with your splitting headaches, You who are nursing the hangovers that didn't come from drinking wine. 22 Your Master, your God, has something to say, your God has taken up his people's case: "Look, I've taken back the drink that sent you reeling. No more drinking from that jug of my anger! 23 I've passed it over to your abusers to drink, those who ordered you, 'Down on the ground so we can walk all over you!' And you had to do it. Flat on the ground, you were the dirt under their feet."
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Isaiah 51:17-23
Commentary on Isaiah 51:17-23
(Read Isaiah 51:17-23)
God calls upon his people to mind the things that belong to their everlasting peace. Jerusalem had provoked God, and was made to taste the bitter fruits. Those who should have been her comforters, were their own tormentors. They have no patience by which to keep possesion of their own souls, nor any confidence in God's promise, by which to keep possession of its comfort. Thou art drunken, not as formerly, with the intoxicating cup of Babylon's idolatries, but with the cup of affliction. Know, then, the cause of God's people may for a time seem as lost, but God will protect it, by convincing the conscience, or confounding the projects, of those that strive against it. The oppressors required souls to be subjected to them, that every man should believe and worship as they would have them. But all they could gain by violence was, that people were brought to outward hypocritical conformity, for consciences cannot be forced.