What is the context?
The Lord announces new heavens and a new earth, then calls people to rejoice in the Jerusalem He creates for joy. He Himself delights in His people, and the sounds of crying and weeping cease.
The description answers the losses people have known. Infants no longer live only a few days, old people live out their years, and death at a hundred is pictured as death in youth. Houses are inhabited by their builders, and those who plant enjoy the fruit.
Labor will not be wasted, and children will not be born for disaster. The Lord promises to answer before the call is finished. The closing picture joins wolves and lambs, lions eating straw and a serpent whose food is dust.
These promises gather around the absence of harm on His holy mountain. They describe life transformed by His blessing, while the mention of death in verse 20 is an important detail in the differing readings of the passage.
How is this passage commonly understood?
Some Christians understand this as a renewed earthly kingdom before the final state in which death is gone. John Walvoord’s account places Isaiah’s promises of greatly improved physical conditions within Christ’s reign on earth, distinguishing that period from the final new creation.
Others understand the whole passage as a picture of the lasting new creation, with verse 20 using the language of long life to express freedom from untimely death. In the published abstract of his study of Isaiah 65:20, G. K. Beale explains this reading through the surrounding promises and their connection with Revelation.
Henry emphasizes a coming happy condition of the church and treats the images as promises of changed life and harmony. Wesley likewise connects the changed condition with the church and reads the peaceful animals as the removal of enemies’ fierceness.
The difference is chiefly how the imagery and sequence of fulfillment are understood. The promised relief from loss, oppression and destructive hostility remains central to each reading.
Where does this fit in God's plan?
Second Peter 3:10–14 explicitly looks for the promised new heaven and new earth where righteousness dwells. That hope becomes a reason for present holiness, godliness and peace.
Revelation 21:1–8 takes up the new heaven and new earth and the end of crying. It explicitly adds that death will be no more as God dwells with His people and makes all things new.
The New Testament therefore supplies a clear destination for the hope Isaiah announces. Whatever differences remain over how the details unfold, God’s people are taught to look toward His righteous new creation and live now in keeping with that hope.
What is our position?
We don't have a position on this passage yet. When our study reaches a conclusion the text supports, it will appear here.