The Grace Reading
Verse 2 is true. That is exactly what makes it dangerous quoted alone. Israel's sin really had separated them, really had put a face behind a cloud, and Isaiah is not exaggerating for effect. Under the terms of that covenant, iniquity and access could not share a room.
But Isaiah is not writing a permanent description of how God relates to human beings. He is writing a diagnosis, and a diagnosis exists to be answered. So keep reading the chapter. Israel looks for justice and finds none. Nobody steps forward. Then this: “He saw that there was no man, And wondered that there was no intercessor; Therefore His own arm brought salvation for Him” (Isaiah 59:16). No one could bridge the gap, so God stopped waiting for a bridge builder and came Himself.
That is the whole shape of the gospel, sitting fourteen verses past the sentence everyone quotes. The separation was real, and it was the very thing the cross ended. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). Once were. Paul puts it in the past tense deliberately. Colossians says it the same way: you were alienated and an enemy in your mind by wicked works, “yet now He has reconciled in the body of His flesh through death, to present you holy, and blameless, and above reproach in His sight” (Colossians 1:21–22).
This is why preaching Isaiah 59:2 at believers does real damage. It takes a wall Christ demolished and rebuilds it, brick by brick, in the imagination of people He already carried across. When that curtain tore in the temple, it tore from the top down, which is God signing His name to the work. To tell a Christian his sins are hiding God's face is to un-tear that veil in his mind and send him back outside a building that no longer has a door problem.
Read the rest of the chapter and you will find the Redeemer coming to Zion (59:20), which is where Paul goes when he quotes it (Romans 11:26). So if you are in Christ, the separation Isaiah described is history, and you are living on the far side of it. God is not hiding His face from you. He turned it toward you at Calvary and has not looked away since. The distance you feel on a hard day is not the distance you are at. His own arm brought salvation, and His own arm is what is holding you.
The Common Misreading
Isaiah 59:2 is one of the most quoted verses in appeals aimed at people who are already saved. Used that way it makes sin a wall that goes back up each time you fail and comes down each time you grovel, and it trains believers to read every dry season as evidence that God has stepped behind a cloud. The verse describes the condition Christ came to end. It does not describe the people He ended it for.
Verse 16 is the rest of the thought: there was no intercessor, so God's own arm brought salvation. That arm has a name. The wall came down once and did not go back up, and the God who tore the veil from the top is not standing on the other side of a barrier He removed Himself.