What Does Isaiah 40:31 (Wings Like Eagles Verse) Mean?

Isaiah 40:31 teaches that those who hope in the Lord will exchange their exhaustion for renewed strength. Trusting in God's faithfulness and his past actions enables believers to rise above challenges, like eagles who embody power and confidence rooted in their creator.

When life feels overwhelming and exhausting, we need a promise of renewal to give us strength. But according to Isaiah 40:31, this promised renewal comes with a condition. Moving out of exhaustion and into a place of confident strength requires waiting—waiting for God.

So does waiting mean we passively sit back until God does something? Or is there some sort of action we take in the meantime?

Here’s the whole verse:

“But those who wait for Yahweh will renew their strength, they will rise up on wings as eagles, they will run and not be exhausted, they will walk and not be weary.” (Isa. 40:31, BibleProject Translation)

This sounds like an extraordinary transformation. How can waiting make it possible?

When we’re suffering, we tend to see only the present moment. Our perception narrows and we experience despair. And in that context, passively waiting around for something to happen seems very unhelpful.

The good news is that Isaiah 40:31 isn’t talking about passive waiting, but about a different way of seeing the world—an expansion of our perception through memory.

The Hebrew verb translated as “wait” is qavah, and it's related to qav, which means “cord” or “rope.” Imagine a rope being pulled tight and stretched out. That's qavah—the feeling of expectation or anticipation at the release of tension.⁽¹⁾

That's why qavah is sometimes translated as “hope,” and here specifically, the prophet invites readers to qavah—to wait, or to hope. Not to wait for the best solution as we see it, or for our circumstances to improve. But to wait for the Lord.

By directing us to wait specifically for God, we realize that the resolution or the tension release we’re anticipating is found only in God.

In the biblical imagination, expecting God to intervene is related to the simple fact of history. By recalling God's past actions we gain a renewed perspective for the present moment, which anticipates in hope (qavah) that God will act similarly once again.

But how does that lead to renewed personal strength? To answer, we need to look at the chapter as a whole.

The words in Isaiah 40 are aimed at the Israelites during the Babylonian exile. They’ve suffered for decades under brutal oppression and are now wondering if God has forgotten them.

Is God failing to enact justice? Or is he simply refusing to act because he no longer cares? Israel declares, “Hidden is my way from Yahweh, and my justice bypasses my God” (Isa. 40:27, BPT).

After seeing Jerusalem invaded and the temple of Yahweh destroyed, and after the disorienting experience of captivity, Israel feels helpless and rejected. They interpret their experience to mean that either God no longer cares or he is (a lot) less powerful than the Babylonians and their gods.

Suffering shapes their perception, and now they can see the world only through the narrow lens of their present reality. God’s eternal covenantal love (Jer. 31:3) and his place in the world as the unrivaled, all-powerful creator is forgotten. He now seems distant and unresponsive toward them, and their hope is waning—if not gone.

Israel’s view of God profoundly impacts how they see themselves as well. Their identity is inseparably bound to Yahweh's identity and to his actions in history. They see themselves as a people chosen by the creator of the cosmos, who demonstrated his superiority over empires and their deities by rescuing Israel from what seemed like inescapable Egyptian slavery (Exod. 20:1-2).

By describing God as uncaring or powerless, the people of Israel demonstrate forgetfulness for who God is and, therefore, who they are. It’s no wonder, then, that they feel hopeless and abandoned.

This pattern of forgetfulness, loss of identity, and subsequent despair is not unique to Israel. It describes a universal human tendency, especially during times of exhaustion. In the midst of suffering, the world seems to constrict to that moment; our perception decreases until we can see nothing but our tragic circumstances.

Because this is a natural human reaction, leading us to forget God’s actions in the past, it’s important to recognize that pain and weariness work to silence our hope for the future.

That’s why the antidote to this exhausted condition—waiting on the Lord—is all about memory.

The prophet addresses Israel's lack of memory with two rhetorical questions: "Have you not known? Have you not heard? Yahweh is an eternal God, creator of the ends of the earth" (Isa. 40:28, BPT).

The questions intend to reverse Israel’s accusations. It's not God who lacks knowledge or memory; it's Israel. The key theme of the chapter is the prophet reminding Israel who Yahweh is.

From the beginning, Isaiah 40 is framed as a consolation to Israel (40:1) as it announces the end of exile (Isa. 40:2 and Isa. 40:11). Then the prophet is called to lift his voice and announce the incomparable and transcendent nature of the creator (Isa. 40:6). A survey of the cosmos reveals that only Yahweh could create the mountains and seas (Isa. 40:12). The empires and idols are nothing compared to him (Isa. 40:15 and Isa. 40:19-20).

The people of Israel find their consolation in remembering the identity of their God. Comfort is rooted in memory.

So when we get to the final verse, “But those who wait for Yahweh” (Isa. 40:31), hope for God is framed as remembering who he is. Israel’s “not knowing” is healed through remembering, and that’s what the prophet calls “qavah for Yahweh”—waiting for God.

Isaiah 40 invites Israel (and all of us) to remember who God is and what he has done. But remembering is not merely about recalling facts related to Yahweh’s omnipotence and transcendence.

The text is written in a sophisticated poetic form in order to address Israel’s emotions—fear, anger, and helplessness. It’s not just a cold, analytical, historical review; the text is clothed in beauty because it aims to comfort and build confidence for hurting people.

Poetry can engage us holistically, touching heart and mind, and the text opens a way to new emotions, such as wonder, love, and hope. Another of poetry's tasks is to reshape our imagination, allowing us to see the world with a broader and renewed perspective.⁽²⁾ This poetry in Isaiah 40 could be seen as memory poetry.

In context, we see that the meaning of the word “wait” in Isaiah 40:31 is not about passively sitting back until something happens. Waiting, here, is about a posture of active recalling, which the text itself models by literally giving us a way to remember. The prophet meditates on the Torah as he recalls the creation and exodus stories, and with poetry, he guides us to a particular way of imagining the world.⁽³⁾

So why is the image of eagles important?

Here’s our verse once more: “They will rise up on wings as eagles, they will run and not be exhausted, they will walk and not be weary” (Isa. 40:31, BPT).

This image of lifting high into the sky, flying like eagles, should evoke Israel’s memory of the exodus, where God says, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exod. 19:4, BPT).

With this allusion, Israel remembers how God intervened in their history—how he rescued his people and established his unstoppable ability to rescue them once again. He carried them out of suffering before; he can (and will) do it again.

And yet, the prophet presents an interesting twist. God is not the eagle; Israel is the eagle. God does the carrying, and he carries the people to himself. But it’s Israel who flies like an eagle. It’s like God is saying, “Remember when I saved you and carried you to myself by making you fly like an eagle.”

By actively recalling what is true about God so far, “those who wait for Yahweh” become like eagles—powerful, strong, and similar to the creator.

The point sharpens in verse 31, where, like God (see Isa. 40:28), those who wait do not become “exhausted” or “weary.” This reveals a key connection between waiting and the promises of renewed strength.

By remembering their God, the Israelites can recover their identity as God’s beloved firstborn (Exod. 4:22). But more importantly, after surveying the cosmos and looking to find someone (anyone) like Yahweh, we’re directed to remember that all of humanity is created in God’s image (see Gen. 1:27).

The call to “wait for Yahweh” invites Israel (and ultimately all of us) into a dynamic engagement with God’s past acts of faithfulness. This way of remembering leads to renewed strength and a history-grounded vision of hope for the future.

The concept of waiting in Isaiah 40:31 is not about passive resignation, where we check out and wait for God to eventually act in some way. So when we experience those tense, exhausting circumstances that scream, “It’s hopeless!” we can avoid the trap of thinking that real strength and hope are only possible when things are good.

And we can learn from Isaiah and the whole story of the Bible that the expected release of tension we wait for is found only in God, who transforms despair into endurance and powerlessness into purpose.

1. Daniel Schibler, "קוה," New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Willem A. VanGemeren (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), 3:893.
2. See further Malcolm Guite, Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2016), 243-244.
3. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 189.