Isaiah 64:10

"Thy holy cities are become a wilderness, Zion is become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant places are laid waste. Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O Jehovah? wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?"

"Thy holy cities ..." (Isaiah 64:10). Only Jerusalem was ordinarily honored with the title of "Holy City"; but here the term is extended to include all the cities of Judah. This is not out of keeping with the rest of the Old Testament, because in Zechariah 2:12, the whole land of Judah is called the Holy Land.

"Our beautiful house (the Temple) is burned with fire ..." (Isaiah 64:11). As Hailey noted, believers in the multiple authorship of Isaiah, "Ascribe this portion of the book to the times after the exile,"[14] according to the critical dictum that God could not have prophesied the burning of the temple until after the event. It is high time the critics invented another "dictum." The Old Testament prophesied the birth of Christ in Bethlehem about 800 years before the event! Furthermore, Isaiah authored hundreds of prophecies that are even far more wonderful than foretelling the burning of the temple, centuries, and even millenniums before they happened; and some of those events have not even happened yet! "The Bible abounds in declaring events long before they occur, speaking of them as though they had already taken place."[15] The burnt temple in this passage is an example of this. We have often mentioned Isaiah's prophecy of the two graves of Jesus (Isaiah 53:9).

"Wilt thou refrain thyself ...?" (Isaiah 64:12). The prayer closes with a series of questions, "Wilt thou refrain thyself?, wilt thou hold thy peace? wilt thou afflict us sorely? wilt thou refuse to come to our aid? wilt thou decline to come to us? wilt thou not save us from our calamities? Not all of these are formulated into words, but all of them are implied. The prayer closes with these questions, which, on the face of things required negative answers to all of them. That answer was forthcoming from God Himself in the next chapter. Moreover, God gave the reasons for his answer.