This is the one I esteem

God says what impresses Him, in one sentence, and it is not what anyone would have guessed.

The verse before sets it up. Heaven is My throne and earth is My footstool — where is the house you will build for Me? Where will My resting place be? Has not My hand made all these things?

That is the passage Stephen quoted at his trial, in Week Nine. The temple is not a container.

And then, having dismissed the building, God names what He does look at.

This is the one I esteem: he who is humble and contrite in spirit, and who trembles at My word.

Three marks, and the third is the one this volume has been circling for eleven weeks.

Humble — the Hebrew is the poor or afflicted man, someone with nothing to bring.

Contrite in spirit — literally stricken or broken. The same root describes a shattered vessel.

Trembles at My word — and the verb means to shake, to be in dread, to hurry in fear. It is used of a mountain quaking and of a man startled.

Which is a strange test to apply, and worth thinking about carefully, because trembling is not the same as being frightened of God generally.

It is a reaction to a specific thing: the Word. A man reads a sentence and something in him moves — not because the prose is fine but because he has understood who is speaking and that it applies to him.

And the opposite is not disbelief. It is the far more common condition of reading it with total composure. Agreeing. Underlining. Feeling nothing move.

Ezra knew the word. When he heard of the unfaithfulness of the returned exiles, everyone who trembled at the words of the God of Israel gathered around him — and the same phrase turns up later in Isaiah 66 for people despised by their own brothers.

The verse offers no method for producing the reaction, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. You cannot decide to tremble.

And it is worth setting the verse beside the one man in Scripture most obviously described as meeting it. Josiah heard the book read and tore his robe, and the word God sent back to him was that his heart was tender and he had humbled himself. The reaction Isaiah 66:2 names is the reaction Week One opened with.

But the verse does tell you what God is looking at, and it is not the building, the program, the offering, or the size of anything. It is a poor man, broken, who shakes when the Book is opened.

Isaiah 66 is the final chapter of the book and opens with the throne-and-footstool passage quoted by Stephen in Acts 7:49–50. The rejection of the temple as a container and the naming of the humble man come in consecutive verses.

The phrase those who tremble at His word becomes almost a title in the post-exilic material. Ezra 9:4 and 10:3 use it of a group who gathered around Ezra, and Isaiah 66:5 addresses them directly as people hated and excluded by their own brothers for the sake of the LORD’s name.

The word for contrite is used in Psalm 34:18 and 51:17 — the LORD is near to the brokenhearted, and a broken and contrite heart God will not despise. Isaiah’s three marks belong to a settled biblical vocabulary about what God attends to.

Verse 2 also contains the counterweight that keeps the verse from sentimentality: My hand made all these things, and so they came into being. The One who looks at the trembling man is the One who made the universe, and the sentence puts both facts side by side deliberately.

The chapter goes on to describe people who choose their own ways and delight in their abominations, and says that when God called, no one answered; when He spoke, they did not listen. The trembling man is defined by contrast with people who heard the same words and were unmoved.

Look it upH6041 עָנִי ani, poor, afflicted, humble · H5223 נָכֶה nakeh, stricken, contrite · H2730 חָרֵד chared, trembling, fearful · H5027 נָבַט nabat, to look, regard, esteem

Where this touchesIsaiah 66:1–5 · Acts 7:49–50 (Week Nine, Day One) · Ezra 9:4; 10:3 · Psalm 51:17 · 2 Kings 22:19 (Week One, Day One). Psalm 19, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, Isaiah 55:10–11, Matthew 24:35, Psalm 12:6, Matthew 5:18, Romans 15:4, Hebrews 4:12, Psalm 119:89 and Joshua 21:45 were the earlier single-verse days.