Catholic Commentary
Instant Divine Communion and Cosmic Peace
24It will happen that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.25The wolf and the lamb will feed together. The lion will eat straw like the ox. Dust will be the serpent’s food. They will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain,” says Yahweh.
Isaiah 65:24–25 describes the renewal of creation and God's relationship with His people, where divine responsiveness becomes so intimate that God answers before prayers are even spoken. The vision includes the restoration of peace in nature, symbolized by predator and prey feeding together without violence, representing the complete abolition of the separation between God and humanity that characterizes the present age.
Before you ask, God is already answering—and in the renewed creation, ancient enemies will feed from the same table.
Isaiah 65:24 — "Before they call, I will answer"
The syntax is striking and deliberate: the divine answer precedes the human petition. This is not mere divine efficiency but a statement about the nature of eschatological intimacy. In the present age, prayer moves from creature to Creator across a felt distance — even when answered, there is a sequence, a waiting, a passage of time. Isaiah announces that in the renewed Jerusalem (vv. 17–23), that temporal and relational gap will be abolished. The verb qārāʾ ("to call") is the standard Hebrew verb for invoking God in prayer, the same root used throughout the Psalms for urgent address to YHWH (e.g., Ps 17:6; 86:5). But here YHWH speaks first. The phrase "while they are still speaking, I will hear" (the second half of v. 24, often rendered as a parallelism with the first) intensifies the image: not only does God answer before the prayer is finished forming, He hears before it is even fully articulated. This is an image of radical divine immanence — not the distant sovereign who must be petitioned across a great remove, but a Father whose attentiveness to His children is so total that He moves to meet their need before the need is even named. The eschatological register is important: Isaiah is not promising this as the ordinary experience of every prayer in the present age, but as the characteristic condition of the renewed relationship between God and His people in the age to come. It describes not an occasional mystical experience but the normal mode of divine-human communion in the new creation.
Isaiah 65:25 — "The wolf and the lamb will feed together"
This verse reprises and completes the famous vision of Isaiah 11:6–9, the "peaceable kingdom" oracle. There, the sequence was more elaborate: wolf with lamb, leopard with kid, calf and lion together, a child leading them, the nursing child playing near the serpent's den. Here, Isaiah compresses the image to its essential poles — wolf and lamb, the predator and the most vulnerable prey — and places them at the same feeding trough. The verb "feed together" (yirʿû yaḥdāw) evokes pastoral harmony; these are not merely coexisting at a safe distance but sharing the same pasture, the same meal. The image moves from the animal world to the human with the note about dust as the serpent's food — a deliberate echo of Genesis 3:14, where the serpent is cursed to eat dust. In the new creation, the serpent remains in its cursed, diminished state (it does not rise to feed with the lamb), but within that constraint, the violence it introduced into creation no longer cascades through the animal world. There will be "no harm or destruction on all my holy mountain," echoing the formula of 11:9. The "holy mountain" is Zion, now expanded to encompass the whole renewed earth.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Allegorically, the wolf and lamb figure the reconciliation of Gentile and Jew, fierce persecutor and gentle believer, within the one flock of Christ — a reading championed by several Fathers (see below). Anagogically, the passage points to the final state of the redeemed in the beatific vision, where prayer as petition gives way to the unmediated knowledge and love of God. The "feeding together" of former enemies anticipates the Eucharistic table where every wall of division is broken down (Eph 2:14).
Catholic tradition reads Isaiah 65:24–25 through several interlocking lenses that give it a distinctively rich theological resonance.
On verse 24 and prayer: St. Augustine, in his Letters (Ep. 130, "To Proba, on Prayer"), teaches that perfect prayer is ultimately the soul's alignment with a God who already knows and anticipates every need — "He does not need to be informed of your wishes by your words; He who made you knows what you need before you ask." Augustine sees this Isaianic promise as the eschatological fulfillment of what the Lord's Prayer trains us toward: a union so intimate that desire and fulfillment become simultaneous. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2736–2737) echoes this when it warns against treating prayer as a mechanism to inform or move God, and insists that "the problem of prayer is not so much God's absence as our own failure to persevere." Isaiah 65:24 stands as the horizon toward which that perseverance is aimed — the age in which no such lag will remain. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (§31–34), reflects on eschatological hope as a transformation of our very capacity for desire, which resonates deeply with this verse's image of needs answered before they crystallize.
On verse 25 and cosmic peace: St. Irenaeus (Adversus Haereses V.33) reads the peaceable kingdom passages of Isaiah as a literal description of the millennial renewal of creation, insisting against Gnostic disdain for matter that God's redemption extends to the physical cosmos. While the Church does not endorse millenarianism in the strict sense (CCC §676), it firmly teaches the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation (renovatio mundi), for which Isaiah 65:25 is a key scriptural warrant. The Second Vatican Council (Gaudium et Spes §39) declares that "the expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one." The wolf-and-lamb vision is thus not escapism but a standard against which the Church measures every effort at human reconciliation, ecological care, and peacemaking. St. John Paul II (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §34) drew on precisely this prophetic tradition to ground the Church's social teaching in eschatological hope.
For a Catholic today, verse 24 is both a consolation and a challenge to the quality of one's prayer life. If God already knows and moves toward our need before we articulate it, then the purpose of prayer is not negotiation but communion — not changing God's mind but deepening our receptivity to a love that is already turned toward us. This reframes intercessory prayer: we are not storming a reluctant heaven but cooperating with a divine initiative already underway. Practically, this invites a contemplative dimension into even the most urgent petitions — pausing to listen before speaking, trusting that God is already at work in the situation we bring.
Verse 25 speaks powerfully to the Catholic commitment to reconciliation — in families fractured by estrangement, in communities divided by race, class, or ideology, in a Church navigating real disagreement. The wolf-and-lamb image does not promise that differences disappear, but that the predatory dynamic — domination, exploitation, fear — is replaced by shared nourishment. Every act of genuine reconciliation, every Eucharist celebrated across social divides, every work of restorative justice, is a partial and anticipatory sign of what God has promised to complete.
Commentary