Catholic Commentary
God's Challenge: Look to the Stars and Know Your Creator
25“To whom then will you liken me? Who is my equal?” says the Holy One.26Lift up your eyes on high, and see who has created these, who brings out their army by number. He calls them all by name. By the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power, not one is lacking.
Isaiah 40:25–26 presents God's absolute uniqueness and incomparability to all creation, contrasting the one true God with the powerless idols of Babylon. The passage commands exiles to observe the stars as evidence of divine sovereignty, demonstrating that God alone creates and commands all celestial bodies by name, proving God's supreme power over human fate and destiny.
God names every star by name—which means the God who commands the cosmos is the God who knows you.
The phrase "calling them all by name" is among the most intimate in all of cosmological Scripture. In the ancient Near East, to know someone's name was to have power over them; here, God knows every star by name — yet none of the stars has power over God. This is a direct counter-polemic against Babylonian astral religion, which held that the stars governed human fate. Isaiah's God does not consult the stars; he commands them by name like a general addressing his troops. "Not one is missing" — the whole host answers the roll call. If God's providence extends to each star in its orbit, how much more to each Israelite in exile?
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The Church Fathers read the "host called by name" christologically, seeing in the Word who names the stars the same Logos by whom "all things were made" (John 1:3). The one who calls the stars by name will, in the fullness of time, call his sheep by name (John 10:3). The cosmic and the personal converge in Christ, making Isaiah 40:26 a quiet prophecy of the Incarnation's logic: a God intimate enough to name every star is a God capable of taking a human name.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to bear on these two verses.
The Doctrine of Divine Incomparability and Analogy. The First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, 1870) formally taught that God is "incomprehensible" and "infinitely perfect," and that human language about God is analogical, never univocal. Isaiah 40:25 stands behind this doctrinal tradition: the rhetorical question "To whom will you liken me?" is the scriptural ground for the Church's insistence that God transcends every category. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 42) teaches that "God transcends all creatures. We must therefore continually purify our language of everything in it that is limited, image-bound or imperfect." The verse is thus not merely poetic — it is a charter for apophatic (negative) theology.
Creation ex nihilo and Providence. The use of bārāʾ in verse 26 was noted by the Fathers as evidence of creation out of nothing. St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses II.10.4) cites the absolute sovereignty of the Creator — who needs no pre-existing matter — against Gnostic dualisms. The CCC §§ 296–297 explicitly links creation ex nihilo to God's omnipotence and freedom. The stars brought out "by number" further support what CCC § 302 calls divine providence: God "not only gives things their being, but also — and at all times — upholds and sustains them in being."
Astral Religion and Idolatry. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Genesis) and later St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q.70, a.3) both explicitly argued that the stars are instruments of God, not agents of fate. The Church's perennial condemnation of astrology (cf. CCC § 2116) draws precisely on the logic of Isaiah 40:26: the stars obey; they do not govern.
The Holy Name. The intimacy of "calling them by name" resonates with the Catholic theology of the divine name developed in CCC §§ 203–213, connecting the God who names the stars with the God who revealed his name — YHWH — to Moses, and ultimately with Jesus, in whom the fullness of divine self-disclosure occurs.
These verses were first spoken to people who had every reason to feel cosmically abandoned — exiles who looked up at the same stars the Babylonians worshipped and wondered whether those stars governed their fate. The contemporary Catholic faces an analogous pressure: a secular culture that reduces human beings to products of blind cosmic forces, and a digital age that manufactures countless idols of comparison — celebrities, influencers, ideologies — all implicitly answering Isaiah's question "To whom will you liken me?" with a list of substitutes.
The spiritual practice embedded in verse 26 is concrete: lift up your eyes. This is a physical act before it is a metaphysical argument. The next clear night, step outside, look up, and consciously recite the verse. Stargazing becomes a form of lectio divina. The person who does this regularly will find their anxieties — about status, relevance, control — scaled against the host of stars called by name, and begin to trust that the God who misses not one star in the night sky is unlikely to lose track of one soul in prayer. This is not escapism; it is the reorientation of perspective that makes genuine action in the world possible.
Commentary
Isaiah 40:25 — "To whom then will you liken me? Or who is my equal? says the Holy One."
The particle "then" (Hebrew wə'el-mî) links this verse directly to the polemic of the preceding verses (vv. 18–24), where the prophet has already mocked the craftsmen who fashion idols from timber and gold. The question is not genuinely open — it is a rhetorical dismissal, a gauntlet thrown down before the gods of Babylon and before Israel's own temptation to despair. The title deployed here, haqqādôsh — "the Holy One" — is Isaiah's signature epithet for God, used more than twenty-five times in this book and virtually nowhere else in the Hebrew canon with the same frequency and weight. Holiness in this context is not merely moral purity; it is ontological otherness, the absolute qualitative difference between the Creator and all that is created. To ask "who is my equal?" when the speaker is the Holy One is already to answer: no one, nothing.
This verse continues a chain of incomparability statements that runs through the whole of Second Isaiah (chapters 40–55), forming the theological spine of the Deutero-Isaian consolation. The Babylonian gods — Marduk, Bel, Nebo — are named and shamed elsewhere in this section (Isaiah 46:1–2). Here, the argument is even more radical: it is not merely that Israel's God is stronger than the gods of Babylon, but that the very category of "comparable deity" is incoherent when applied to the Holy One.
Isaiah 40:26 — "Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name; by the greatness of his might and because he is strong in power, not one is missing."
The imperative "Lift up your eyes" (śə'û-mārôm ʿênêkem) is an act of directed worship before it is an act of observation. Isaiah does not say "study the heavens" in a detached, scientific way; he says see — look with recognition, look with the eyes of faith. The word "these" ('ēlleh) points upward with an almost physical gesture at the star-strewn sky visible to exiles lying awake on Babylonian soil, far from Jerusalem.
The Hebrew word for "created" here is bārāʾ, the same majestic verb used in Genesis 1:1, reserved in the Hebrew Bible almost exclusively for divine action. No human craftsman bārāʾ; only God does. The stars are not random phenomena, nor are they Babylonian deities — they are a host (ṣābāʾ), a military formation marshaled by a Commander who "brings them out by number." This military imagery is deliberate: the God who calls the stars to assembly can certainly muster the forces to liberate his exiled people.