Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall grow old like a garment, and they that dwell in it shall die in like manner: but my salvation shall be forever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.
All Commentaries on Isaiah 51:6 Go To Isaiah 51
Jerome
AD 420
And not only the souls of people, which are immortal, but also their bodies will be changed into a glorified substance.… The opinion of the world’s philosophers is that all things that we can see will be destroyed by fire.… Just as John the apostle says, “The world and its desire will pass away,” and here in Hebrew it is said, “The sky like smoke will evaporate,” or, as Aquila and Symmachus have it, “will be reduced to nothing and will be worn away.” … Therefore I wonder at what the Septuagint wants to say when it says, “The sky like smoke has been made firm.” For if we take “firmness” to be “solidity,” how can what is firm be compared with smoke? Unless perhaps we can say that all the firmness and solidity and strength of the heaven that dissolves in the air is as Ecclesiastes says, the most empty wind and smoke: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” And that must be said that if the sky and the earth were to perish and grow old, then its inhabitants would also die and vanish, although we know that souls are everlasting and bodies are also resurrected. From this it is clear that heaven and earth do not perish and become reduced to nothing, but they are changed into something better.
