The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 1 (of 2)
by George Adam Smith · English · Gutenberg #39767 · 807,670 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 1 (of 2)
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: George Adam Smith
Editor: Sir W. Robertson Nicoll
Release date: May 22, 2012 [eBook #39767]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39767
Credits: Produced by Colin Bell, Julia Neufeld and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE: THE BOOK OF ISAIAH, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***
Produced by Colin Bell, Julia Neufeld and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
[=a] depicts a macron over "a" as in "d[=a]l"
Variations in spelling and hyphenation have been preserved except in
obvious cases of typographical error.
All advertising has been moved to the end of the book.
THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE
EDITED BY THE REV.
SIR W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
_Editor of "The Expositor," etc._
THE BOOK OF ISAIAH
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A.
_VOLUME 1._
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON. MCMX
THE
BOOK OF ISAIAH
BY THE REV.
GEORGE ADAM SMITH, M.A., D.D.
_Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College, Glasgow_
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. I.--ISAIAH I.-XXXIX.
_TWENTIETH EDITION_
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON. MCMX
_Printed by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
TABLE OF DATES xvi
BOOK I.
_ISAIAH'S PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO
THE DEATH OF AHAZ_, 727 B.C.
CHAP.
I. ISAIAH'S PREFACE--THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD. 3
ISAIAH i.
II. THE THREE JERUSALEMS 19
ISAIAH ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.
III. THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD 35
ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.
IV. ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION 57
ISAIAH vi. 740. WRITTEN 735 OR 727 B.C. (?).
V. THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD 91
WITH A MAP.
VI. KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH 103
ISAIAH vii.-ix. 1-8. 735-732 B.C.
VII. THE MESSIAH 131
BOOK II.
_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH
TO THE DEATH OF SARGON_,
727-705 B.C.
VIII. GOD'S COMMONPLACE 151
ISAIAH xxviii. ABOUT 725 B.C.
IX. ATHEISM OF FORCE AND ATHEISM OF FEAR 168
ISAIAH x. 5-34. ABOUT 721 B.C.
X. THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MAN AND THE ANIMALS 179
ISAIAH xi.; xii. ABOUT 720 B.C. (?).
XI. DRIFTING TO EGYPT, 720-705 B.C. 196
ISAIAH xx. (711 B.C.); xxi. 1-10 (710 B.C.); xxxviii.; xxxix.
BOOK III.
_ORATIONS ON INTRIGUES WITH EGYPT_,
_AND ORACLES ON FOREIGN NATIONS_,
705-702 B.C.
XII. ARIEL, ARIEL 209
ISAIAH xxix. ABOUT 703 B.C.
XIII. POLITICS AND FAITH 221
ISAIAH xxx. ABOUT 702 B.C.
XIV. THREE TRUTHS ABOUT GOD 238
ISAIAH xxxi. ABOUT 702 B.C.
XV. A MAN; OR, CHARACTER AND THE CAPACITY TO
DISCRIMINATE CHARACTER 248
ISAIAH xxxii. 1-8. ABOUT 702 B.C. (?).
XVI. ISAIAH TO WOMEN 262
ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20. DATE UNCERTAIN.
XVII. ISAIAH TO THE FOREIGN NATIONS 271
ISAIAH xiv. 24-xxi.; xxiii. VARIOUS DATES.
XVIII. TYRE; OR, THE MERCENARY SPIRIT 288
ISAIAH xxiii. 702 B.C.
BOOK IV.
_JERUSALEM AND SENNACHERIB, 701 B.C._
XIX. AT THE LOWEST EBB 306
ISAIAH i.; xxii. Early in 701 B.C.
XX. THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS 320
ISAIAH xxii.; xxxiii. LATER IN 701 B.C.
XXI. OUR GOD A CONSUMING FIRE 331
ISAIAH xxxiii.
XXII. THE RABSHAKEH; OR, LAST TRIALS OF FAITH 343
ISAIAH xxxvi. 701 B.C.
XXIII. THIS IS THE VICTORY ... OUR FAITH 352
ISAIAH xxxvii. 701 B.C.
XXIV. A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING
THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM 368
XXV. AN OLD TESTAMENT BELIEVER'S SICK-BED; OR, THE
DIFFERENCE CHRIST HAS MADE 375
ISAIAH xxxviii.; xxxix. DATE UNCERTAIN.
XXVI. HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL? 389
BOOK V.
_PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S
TIME._
XXVII. BABYLON AND LUCIFER 405
ISAIAH xii. 12-xiv. 23. DATE UNKNOWN.
XXVIII. THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL SURROUNDINGS 416
ISAIAH xxiv. DATE UNKNOWN.
XXIX. GOD'S POOR 428
ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv. DATES UNKNOWN.
XXX. THE RESURRECTION 444
ISAIAH xxvi.; xxvii.
INDEX OF CHAPTERS 453
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 455
INTRODUCTION.
As the following Exposition of the Book of Isaiah does not observe the
canonical arrangement of the chapters, a short introduction is necessary
upon the plan which has been adopted.
The size and the many obscurities of the Book of Isaiah have limited the
common use of it in the English tongue to single conspicuous passages,
the very brilliance of which has cast their context and original
circumstance into deeper shade. The intensity of the gratitude with
which men have seized upon the more evangelical passages of Isaiah, as
well as the attention which apologists for Christianity have too
partially paid to his intimations of the Messiah, has confirmed the
neglect of the rest of the Book. But we might as well expect to receive
an adequate conception of a great statesman's policy from the epigrams
and perorations of his speeches as to appreciate the message, which God
has sent to the world through the Book of Isaiah, from a few lectures on
isolated, and often dislocated, texts. No book of the Bible is less
susceptible of treatment apart from the history out of which it sprang
than the Book of Isaiah; and it may be added, that in the Old Testament
at least there is none which, when set in its original circumstance and
methodically considered as a whole, appeals with greater power to the
modern conscience. Patiently to learn how these great prophecies were
suggested by, and first met, the actual occasions of human life, is
vividly to hear them speaking home to life still.
I have, therefore, designed an arrangement which embraces all the
prophecies, but treats them in chronological order. I will endeavour to
render their contents in terms which appeal to the modern conscience;
but, in order to be successful, such an endeavour presupposes the
exposition of them in relation to the history which gave them birth. In
these volumes, therefore, narrative and historical exposition will take
precedence of practical application.
Every one knows that the Book of Isaiah breaks into two parts between
chaps. xxxix. and xl. Vol. I. of this Exposition covers chaps. i.-xxxix.
Vol. II. will treat of chaps. xl.-lxvi. Again, within chaps. i.-xxxix.
another division is apparent. The most of these chapters evidently bear
upon events within Isaiah's own career, but some imply historical
circumstances that did not arise till long after he had passed away. Of
the five books into which I have divided Vol. I., the first four contain
the prophecies relating to Isaiah's time (740-701 B.C.), and the fifth
the prophecies which refer to later events (chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23;
xxiv.-xxvii.; xxxiv.; xxxv.).
The prophecies, whose subjects fall within Isaiah's times, I have taken
in chronological order, with one exception. This exception is chap. i.,
which, although it published near the end of the prophet's life, I treat
of first, because, from its position as well as its character, it is
evidently intended as a preface to the whole book. The difficulty of
grouping the rest of Isaiah's oracles and orations is great. The plan I
have adopted is not perfect, but convenient. Isaiah's prophesying was
determined chiefly by _four_ Assyrian invasions of Palestine: the first,
in 734-732 B.C., by Tiglath-pileser II., while Ahaz was on the throne;
the second by Salmanassar and Sargon in 725-720, during which Samaria
fell in 721; the third by Sargon, 712-710; the fourth by Sennacherib in
701, which last three occurred while Hezekiah was king of Judah. But
outside the Assyrian invasions there were three other cardinal dates in
Isaiah's life: 740, his call to be a prophet; 727, the death of Ahaz,
his enemy, and the accession of his pupil, Hezekiah; and 705, the death
of Sargon, for Sargon's death led to the rebellion of the Syrian States,
and it was this rebellion which brought on Sennacherib's invasion.
Taking all these dates into consideration, I have placed in Book I. all
the prophecies of Isaiah from his call in 740 to the death of Ahaz in
727; they lead up to and illustrate Tiglath-pileser's invasion; they
cover what I have ventured to call the prophet's apprenticeship, during
which the theatre of his vision was mainly the internal life of his
people, but he gained also his first outlook upon the world beyond. Book
II. deals with the prophecies from the accession of Hezekiah in 727 to
the death of Sargon in 705--a long period, but few prophecies, covering
both Salmanassar's and Sargon's campaigns. Book III. is filled with the
prophecies from 705 to 702, a numerous group, called forth from Isaiah
by the rebellion and political activity in Palestine consequent on
Sargon's death and preliminary to Sennacherib's arrival. Book IV.
contains the prophecies which refer to Sennacherib's actual invasion of
Judah and siege of Jerusalem, in 701.
Of course, any chronological arrangement of Isaiah's prophecies must be
largely provisional. Only some of the chapters are fixed to dates past
possibility of doubt. The Assyriology which has helped us with these
must yield further results before the controversies can be settled that
exist with regard to the rest. I have explained in the course of the
Exposition my reasons for the order which I have followed, and need only
say here that I am still more uncertain about the generally received
dates of chaps x. 5-xi., xvii. 12-14 and xxxii. The religious problems,
however, were so much the same during the whole of Isaiah's career that
uncertainties of date, _if they are confined to the limits of that
career_, make little difference to the exposition of the book.
Isaiah's doctrines, being so closely connected with the life of his day,
come up for statement at many points of the narrative, in which this
Exposition chiefly consists. But here and there I have inserted chapters
dealing summarily with more important topics, such as The World in
Isaiah's Day; The Messiah; Isaiah's Power of Prediction, with its
evidence on the character of Inspiration; and the question, Had Isaiah a
Gospel for the Individual? A short index will guide the student to
Isaiah's teaching on other important points of theology and life, such
as holiness, forgiveness, monotheism, immortality, the Holy Spirit, etc.
Treating Isaiah's prophecies chronologically as I have done, I have
followed a method which put me on the look-out for any traces of
development that his doctrine might exhibit. I have recorded these as
they occur, but it may be useful to collect them here. In chaps. ii.-iv.
we have the struggle of the apprentice prophet's thoughts from the easy
religious optimism of his generation, through unrelieved convictions of
judgement for the whole people, to his final vision of the Divine
salvation of a remnant. Again, chap. vii. following on chaps. ii.-vi.
proves that Isaiah's belief in the Divine righteousness preceded, and
was the parent of, his belief in the Divine sovereignty. Again, his
successive pictures of the Messiah grow in contents, and become more
spiritual. And again, he only gradually arrived at a clear view of the
siege and deliverance of Jerusalem. One other fact of the same kind has
impressed me since I wrote the exposition of chap. i. I have there
stated that it is plain that Isaiah's conscience was perfect just
because it consisted of two complementary parts: one of God the
infinitely High, exalted in righteousness, far above the thoughts of His
people, and the other of God the infinitely Near, concerned and jealous
for all the practical details of their life. I ought to have added that
Isaiah was more under the influence of the former in his earlier years,
but that as he grew older and took a larger share in the politics of
Judah it was the latter view of God, to which he most frequently gave
expression. Signs of a development like these may be fairly used to
correct or support the evidence which Assyriology affords for
determining the chronological order of the chapters.
But these signs of development are more valuable for the proof they give
that the Book of Isaiah contains the experience and testimony of a real
life: a life that learned and suffered and grew, and at last triumphed.
There is not a single word about the prophet's birth or childhood, or
fortune, or personal appearance, or even of his death. But between
silence on his origin and silence on his end--and perhaps all the more
impressively because of these clouds by which it is bounded--there
shines the record of Isaiah's spiritual life and of the unfaltering
career which this sustained,--clear and whole, from his commission by
God in the secret experience of his own heart to his vindication in
God's supreme tribunal of history. It is not only one of the greatest,
but one of the most finished and intelligible, lives in history. My main
purpose in expounding the book is to enable English readers, not only to
follow its course, but to feel, and to be elevated by, its Divine
inspiration.
I may state that this Exposition is based upon a close study of the
Hebrew text of Isaiah, and that the translations are throughout my own,
except in one or two cases where I have quoted from the revised English
version.
With regard to the Revised Version of Isaiah, which I have had
opportunities of thoroughly testing, I would like to say that my sense
of the immense service which it renders to English readers of the Bible
is only exceeded by my wonder that the Revisers have not gone just a
very little farther, and adopted one or two simple contrivances which
are in the line of their own improvements and would have greatly
increased our large debt to them. For instance, why did they not make
plain by inverted commas such undoubted interruptions of the prophet's
own speech as that of the drunkards in chap. xxviii. 9, 10? Not to know
that these verses are spoken in mockery of Isaiah, a mockery to which he
replies in vv. 10-13, is to miss the meaning of the whole passage.
Again, when they printed Job and the Psalms in metrical form, as well as
the Hymn of Hezekiah, why did they not do the same with other poetical
passages of Isaiah, particularly the great Ode on the King of Babylon in
chap. xiv.? This is utterly spoiled in the form in which the Revisers
have printed it. What English reader would guess that it was as much a
piece of metre as any of the Psalms? Again, why have they so
consistently rendered by the misleading word "judgement" a Hebrew term
that no doubt sometimes means an act of doom, but far oftener the
abstract quality of justice? It is such defects, along with a frequent
failure to mark the proper emphasis in a sentence, that have led me to
substitute a more literal version of my own.
I have not thought it necessary to discuss the question of the
chronology of the period. This has been done so often and so recently.
See Robertson Smith's _Prophets of Israel_, pp. 145, 402, 413, Driver's
_Isaiah_, p. 12, or any good commentary.
I append a chronological table, and an index to the canonical chapters
will be found before the index of subjects. The publishers have added a
map of Isaiah's world in illustration of chap. v.
TABLE OF DATES.
B.C.
745. Tiglath-pileser II. ascends the Assyrian Throne.
740. Uzziah dies. Jotham becomes sole King of Judah. Isaiah's
Inaugural Vision (Isa. vi.).
735. Jotham dies. Ahaz succeeds. League of Syria and Northern
Israel against Judah.
734-732. Syrian Campaign of Tiglath-pileser II. Siege and Capture
of Damascus. Invasion of Israel. Captivity of Zebulon,
Naphtali and Galilee (Isa. ix. 1). Ahaz visits Damascus.
727. Salmanassar IV. succeeds Tiglath-pileser II. Hezekiah succeeds
Ahaz (or in 725?).
725. Salmanassar marches on Syria.
722 or 721. Sargon succeeds Salmanassar. Capture of Samaria.
Captivity of all Northern Israel.
720 or 719. Sargon defeats Egypt at Rafia.
711. Sargon invades Syria (Isa. xx.). Capture of Ashdod.
709. Sargon takes Babylon from Merodach-baladan.
705. Murder of Sargon. Sennacherib succeeds.
701. Sennacherib invades Syria. Capture of Coast Towns. Siege
of Ekron and Battle of Eltekeh. Invasion of Judah. Submission
of Hezekiah. Jerusalem spared. Return of
Assyrians with the Rabshakeh to Jerusalem, while Sennacherib's
Army marches on Egypt. Disaster to Sennacherib's
Army near Pelusium. Disappearance of Assyrians from
before Jerusalem--all happening in this order.
697 or 696. Death of Hezekiah. Manasseh succeeds.
681. Death of Sennacherib.
607. Fall of Nineveh and Assyria. Babylon supreme. Jeremiah.
599. First Deportation of Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar.
588. Jerusalem destroyed. Second Deportation of Jews.
538. Cyrus captures Babylon. First Return of Jewish Exiles, under
Zerubbabel, happens soon after.
458. Second Return of Jewish Exiles, under Ezra.
BOOK I
_PREFACE AND PROPHECIES TO THE DEATH OF AHAZ_,
727 B.C.
ISAIAH: i. THE PREFACE.
" ii.-iv. 740-735 B.C.
" v., ix. 8-x. 4. 735 B.C.
" vi. About 735 B.C.
" vii.-ix. 7. 734-732 B.C.
CHAPTER I.
_THE ARGUMENT OF THE LORD AND ITS CONCLUSION._
ISAIAH i.--HIS GENERAL PREFACE.
The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its position not to its
date, but to its character. It was published late in the prophet's life.
The seventh verse describes the land as overrun by foreign soldiery, and
such a calamity befell Judah only in the last two of the four reigns
over which the first verse extends Isaiah's prophesying. In the reign of
Ahaz, Judah was invaded by Syria and Northern Israel, and some have
dated chapter i. from the year of that invasion, 734 B.C. In the reign
again of Hezekiah some have imagined, in order to account for the
chapter, a swarming of neighbouring tribes upon Judah; and Mr. Cheyne,
to whom regarding the history of Isaiah's time we ought to listen with
the greatest deference, has supposed an Assyrian invasion in 711, under
Sargon. But hardly of this, and certainly not of that, have we adequate
evidence, and the only other invasion of Judah in Isaiah's lifetime took
place under Sennacherib, in 701. For many reasons this Assyrian invasion
is to be preferred to that by Syria and Ephraim in 734 as the occasion
of this prophecy. But there is really no need to be determined on the
point. The prophecy has been lifted out of its original circumstance
and placed in the front of the book, perhaps by Isaiah himself, as a
general introduction to his collected pieces. It owes its position, as
we have said, to its character. It is a clear, complete statement of the
points which were at issue between the Lord and His own all the time
Isaiah was the Lord's prophet. It is the most representative of Isaiah's
prophecies, a summary, perhaps better than any other single chapter of
the Old Testament, of the substance of prophetic doctrine, and a very
vivid illustration of the prophetic spirit and method. We propose to
treat it here as introductory to the main subjects and lines of Isaiah's
teaching, leaving its historical references till we arrive in due course
at the probable year of its origin, 701 B.C.[1]
[1] See p. 343.
* * * * *
Isaiah's preface is in the form of a Trial or Assize. Ewald calls it
"The Great Arraignment." There are all the actors in a judicial process.
It is a Crown case, and God is at once Plaintiff and Judge. He delivers
both the Complaint in the beginning (vv. 2, 3) and the Sentence in the
end. The Assessors are Heaven and Earth, whom the Lord's herald invokes
to hear the Lord's plea (ver. 2). The people of Judah are the
Defendants. The charge against them is one of brutish, ingrate
stupidity, breaking out into rebellion. The Witness is the prophet
himself, whose evidence on the guilt of his people consists in
recounting the misery that has overtaken their land (vv. 4-9), along
with their civic injustice and social cruelty--sins of the upper and
ruling classes (vv. 10, 17, 21-23). The people's Plea-in-defence,
laborious worship and multiplied sacrifice, is repelled and exposed (vv.
10-17). And the Trial is concluded--_Come now, let us bring our
reasoning to a close, saith the Lord_--by God's offer of pardon to a
people thoroughly convicted (ver. 18). On which follow the Conditions of
the Future: happiness is sternly made dependent on repentance and
righteousness (vv. 19, 20). And a supplementary oracle is given (vv.
24-31), announcing a time of affliction, through which the nation shall
pass as through a furnace; rebels and sinners shall be consumed, but God
will redeem Zion, and with her a remnant of the people.
That is the plan of the chapter--a Trial at Law. Though it disappears
under the exceeding weight of thought the prophet builds upon it, do not
let us pass hurriedly from it, as if it were only a scaffolding.
That God should argue at all is the magnificent truth on which our
attention must fasten, before we inquire what the argument is about. God
reasons with man--that is the first article of religion according to
Isaiah. Revelation is not magical, but rational and moral. Religion is
reasonable intercourse between one intelligent Being and another. God
works upon man first through conscience.
Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this
same chapter the popular--religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous
worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were
not idolaters.[2] Hezekiah's reformation was over. Judah worshipped her
own God, whom the prophet introduces not as for the first time, but by
Judah's own familiar names for Him--Jehovah, Jehovah of Hosts, the Holy
One of Israel, the Mighty One, or Hero, of Israel. In this hour of
extreme danger the people are waiting on Jehovah with great pains and
cost of sacrifice. They pray, they sacrifice, they solemnize to
perfection. But they do not _know_, they do not _consider_; this is the
burden of their offence. To use a better word, they do not _think_. They
are God's grown-up children (ver. 2)--_children_, that is to say, like
the son of the parable, with native instincts for their God, and _grown
up_--that is to say, with reason and conscience developed. But they use
neither, stupider than very beasts. _Israel doth not know, my people
doth not consider._ In all their worship conscience is asleep, and they
are drenched in wickedness. Isaiah puts their life in an
epigram--_wickedness and worship: I cannot away_, saith the Lord, _with
wickedness and worship_ (ver. 13).
[2] At least those to whom the first twenty-three verses were addressed.
There is distinct blame of worshipping in the groves of Asherah in the
appended oracle (vv. 24-31), which is proof that this oracle was given
at an earlier period than the rest of the chapter--a fair instance of
the very great difficulty we have in determining the dates of the
various prophecies of Isaiah.
But the pressure and stimulus of the prophecy lie in this, that although
the people have silenced conscience and are steeped in a stupidity worse
than ox or ass, God will not leave them alone. He forces Himself upon
them; He compels them to think. In the order and calmness of nature
(ver. 2), apart from catastrophe nor seeking to influence by any
miracle, God speaks to men by the reasonable words of His prophet.
Before He will publish salvation or intimate disaster He must rouse and
startle conscience. His controversy precedes alike His peace and His
judgements. An awakened conscience is His prophet's first demand. Before
religion can be prayer, or sacrifice, or any acceptable worship, it must
be a _reasoning together_ with God.
That is what mean the arrival of the Lord, and the opening of the
assize, and the call to know and consider. It is the terrible necessity
which comes back upon men, however engrossed or drugged they may be, to
pass their lives in moral judgement before themselves; a debate to which
there is never any closure, in which forgotten things will not be
forgotten, but a man "is compelled to repeat to himself things he
desires to be silent about, and to listen to what he does not wish to
hear, ... yielding to that mysterious power which says to him, Think.
One can no more prevent the mind from returning to an idea than the sea
from returning to a shore. With the sailor this is called the tide; with
the guilty it is called remorse. God upheaves the soul as well as the
ocean."[3] Upon that ever-returning and resistless tide Hebrew prophecy,
with its Divine freight of truth and comfort, rides into the lives of
men. This first chapter of Isaiah is just the parable of the awful
compulsion to think which men call conscience. The stupidest of
generations, formal and fat-hearted, are forced to consider and to
reason. The Lord's court and controversy are opened, and men are whipped
into them from His Temple and His altar.
[3] _Les Misérables_: "a Tempest in a Brain."
For even religion and religiousness, the common man's commonest refuge
from conscience--not only in Isaiah's time--cannot exempt from this
writ. Would we be judged by our moments of worship, by our
_temple-treading_, which is Hebrew for church-going, by the wealth of
our sacrifice, by our ecclesiastical position? This chapter drags us out
before the austerity and incorruptibleness of Nature. The assessors of
the Lord are not the Temple nor the Law, but Heaven and Earth--not
ecclesiastical conventions, but the grand moral fundamentals of the
universe, purity, order and obedience to God. Religiousness, however,
is not the only refuge from which we shall find Isaiah startling men
with the trumpet of the Lord's assize. He is equally intolerant of the
indulgent silence and compromises of the world, that give men courage to
say, We are no worse than others. Men's lives, it is a constant truth of
his, have to be argued out not with the world, but with God. If a man
will be silent upon shameful and uncomfortable things, he cannot. His
thoughts are not his own; God will think them for him as God thinks them
here for unthinking Israel. Nor are the practical and intellectual
distractions of a busy life any refuge from conscience. When the
politicians of Judah seek escape from judgement by plunging into deeper
intrigue and a more bustling policy, Isaiah is fond of pointing out to
them that they are only forcing judgement nearer. They do but sharpen on
other objects the thoughts whose edge must some day turn upon
themselves.
What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing
wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is
therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere
rhetoric which opens the Lord's controversy: _Hear, O heavens, and give
ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken_. All the world changes to the
man in whom conscience lifts up her voice, and to the guilty Nature
seems attentive and aware. Conscience compels heaven and earth to act as
her assessors, because she is the voice, and they the creatures, of God.
This leads us to emphasize another feature of the prophecy.
We have called this chapter a trial-at-law; but it is far more a
_personal_ than a legal controversy; of the formally forensic there is
very little about it. Some theologies and many preachers have attempted
the conviction of the human conscience by the technicalities of a system
of law, or by appealing to this or that historical covenant, or by the
obligations of an intricate and burdensome morality. This is not
Isaiah's way. His generation is here judged by no system of law or
ancient covenants, but by a living Person and by His treatment of
them--a Person who is a Friend and a Father. It is not Judah and the law
that are confronted; it is Judah and Jehovah. There is no contrast
between the life of this generation and some glorious estate from which
they or their forefathers have fallen; but they are made to hear the
voice of a living and present God: _I have nourished and brought up
children, and they have rebelled against Me_. Isaiah begins where Saul
of Tarsus began, who, though he afterwards elaborated with wealth of
detail the awful indictment of the abstract law against man, had never
been able to do so but for that first confronting with the Personal
Deity, _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?_ Isaiah's ministry started
from the vision of the Lord; and it was no covenant or theory, but the
Lord Himself, who remained the prophet's conscience to the end.
But though the living God is Isaiah's one explanation of conscience, it
is God in two aspects, the moral effects of which are opposite, yet
complementary. In conscience men are defective by forgetting either the
sublime or the practical, but Isaiah's strength is to do justice to
both. With him God is first the infinitely High, and then equally the
infinitely Near. _The Lord is exalted in righteousness!_ yes, and
sublimely above the people's vulgar identifications of His will with
their own safety and success, but likewise concerned with every detail
of their politics and social behaviour, not to be relegated to the
Temple, where they were wont to confine Him, but by His prophet
descending to their markets and councils, with His own opinion of their
policies, interfering in their intrigues, meeting Ahaz at the conduit of
the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field, and fastening _eyes
of glory_ on every pin and point of the dress of the daughters of Zion.
He is no merely transcendent God. Though He be the High and Holy One, He
will discuss each habit of the people, and argue upon its merits every
one of their policies. His constant cry to them is _Come and let us
reason together_, and to hear it is to have a conscience. Indeed, Isaiah
lays more stress on this intellectual side of the moral sense than on
the other, and the frequency with which in this chapter he employs the
expressions _know_, and _consider_, and _reason_, is characteristic of
all his prophesying. Even the most superficial reader must notice how
much this prophet's doctrine of conscience and repentance harmonizes
with the _metanoia_ of New Testament preaching.
This doctrine, that God has an interest in every detail of practical
life and will argue it out with men, led Isaiah to a revelation of God
quite peculiar to himself. For the Psalmist it is enough that his soul
_come to God, the living God_. It is enough for other prophets to awe
the hearts of their generations by revealing _the Holy One_; but Isaiah,
with his intensely practical genius, and sorely tried by the stupid
inconsistency of his people, bends himself to make them understand that
God is at least a _reasonable_ Being. Do not, his constant cry is, and
he puts it sometimes in almost as many words--do not act as if there
were a Fool on the throne of the universe, which you virtually do when
you take these meaningless forms of worship as your only intercourse
with Him, and beside them practise your rank iniquities, as if He did
not see nor care. We need not here do more than mention the passages in
which, sometimes by a word, Isaiah stings and startles self-conscious
politicians and sinners beetle-blind in sin, with the sense that God
Himself takes an interest in their deeds and has His own working-plans
for their life. On the land question in Judah (v. 9): _In mine ears,
saith the Lord of hosts_. When the people were paralyzed by calamity, as
if it had no meaning or term (xxviii. 29): _This also cometh forth from
the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel and excellent in
effectual working_. Again, when they were panic-stricken, and madly
sought by foolish ways their own salvation (xxx. 18): _For the Lord is a
God of judgement--i.e._, of principle, method, law, with His own way and
time for doing things--_blessed are all they that wait for Him_. And
again, when politicians were carried away by the cleverness and success
of their own schemes (xxxi. 2): _Yet He also is wise_, or clever. It was
only a personal application of this Divine attribute when Isaiah heard
the word of the Lord give him the minutest directions for his own
practice--as, for instance, at what exact point he was to meet Ahaz
(vii. 3); or that he was to take a board and write upon it in the vulgar
character (viii. 1); or that he was to strip frock and sandals, and walk
without them for three years (xx). Where common men feel conscience only
as something vague and inarticulate, a flavour, a sting, a foreboding,
the obligation of work, the constraint of affection, Isaiah heard the
word of the Lord, clear and decisive on matters of policy, and definite
even to the details of method and style.
Isaiah's conscience, then, was perfect, because it was two-fold: _God is
holy; God is practical_. If there be the glory, the purity as of fire,
of His Presence to overawe, there is His unceasing inspection of us,
there is His interest in the smallest details of our life, there are His
fixed laws, from regard for all of which no amount of religious
sensibility may relieve us. Neither of these halves of conscience can
endure by itself. If we forget the first we may be prudent and for a
time clever, but will also grow self-righteous, and in time
self-righteousness means stupidity too. If we forget the second we may
be very devotional, but cannot escape becoming blindly and
inconsistently immoral. Hypocrisy is the result either way, whether we
forget how high God is or whether we forget how near.
To these two great articles of conscience, however--God is high and God
is near--the Bible adds a greater third, God is Love. This is the
uniqueness and glory of the Bible's interpretation of conscience. Other
writings may equal it in enforcing the sovereignty and detailing the
minutely practical bearings of conscience: the Bible alone tells man how
much of conscience is nothing but God's love. It is a doctrine as
plainly laid down as the doctrine about chastisement, though not half so
much recognised--_Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth_. What is true of
the material pains and penalties of life is equally true of the inward
convictions, frets, threats and fears, which will not leave stupid man
alone. To men with their obscure sense of shame, and restlessness, and
servitude to sin the Bible plainly says, "You are able to sin because
you have turned your back to the love of God; you are unhappy because
you do not take that love to your heart; the bitterness of your remorse
is that it is love against which you are ungrateful." Conscience is not
the Lord's persecution, but His jealous pleading, and not the fierceness
of His anger, but the reproach of His love. This is the Bible's doctrine
throughout, and it is not absent from the chapter we are considering.
Love gets the first word even in the indictment of this austere assize:
_I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled
against Me_. Conscience is already a Father's voice: the recollection,
as it is in the parable of the prodigal, of a Father's mercy; the
reproach, as it is with Christ's lamentation over Jerusalem, of outraged
love. We shall find not a few passages in Isaiah, which prove that he
was in harmony with all revelation upon this point, that conscience is
the reproach of the love of God.
But when that understanding of conscience breaks out in a sinner's heart
forgiveness cannot be far away. Certainly penitence is at hand. And
therefore, because of all books the Bible is the only one which
interprets conscience as the love of God, so is it the only one that can
combine His pardon with His reproach, and as Isaiah now does in a single
verse, proclaim His free forgiveness as the conclusion of His bitter
quarrel. _Come, let us bring our reasoning to a close, saith the_ LORD.
_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though
they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool._ Our version, _Come,
and let us reason together_, gives no meaning here. So plain an offer of
pardon is not reasoning together; it is bringing reasoning to an end; it
is the settlement of a dispute that has been in progress. Therefore we
translate, with Mr. Cheyne, _Let us bring our reasoning to an end_. And
how pardon can be the end and logical conclusion of conscience is clear
to us, who have seen how much of conscience is love, and that the
Lord's controversy is the reproach of His Father's heart, and His
jealousy to make His own consider all His way of mercy towards them.
But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and
inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with
which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins.
The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, princes and
counsellors who are denounced. Judah's disasters, which she seeks to
meet by worship, are due to civic faults, bribery, corruption of
justice, indifference to the rights of the poor and the friendless.
Conscience with Isaiah is not what it is with so much of the religion of
to-day, a _cul de sac_, into which the Lord chases a man and shuts him
up to Himself, but it is a thoroughfare by which the Lord drives the man
out upon the world and its manifold need of him. There is little
dissection and less study of individual character with Isaiah. He has no
time for it. Life is too much about him, and his God too much interested
in life. What may be called the more personal sins--drunkenness, vanity
of dress, thoughtlessness, want of faith in God and patience to wait for
Him--are to Isaiah more social than individual symptoms, and it is for
their public and political effects that he mentions them. Forgiveness is
no end in itself, but the opportunity of social service; not a sanctuary
in which Isaiah leaves men to sing its praises or form doctrines of it,
but a gateway through which he leads God's people upon the world with
the cry that rises from him here: _Seek justice, relieve the oppressed,
judge the fatherless, plead for the widow_.
Before we pass from this form in which Isaiah figures religion we must
deal with a suggestion it raises. No modern mind can come into this
ancient court of the LORD's controversy without taking advantage of its
open forms to put a question regarding the rights of man there. That God
should descend to argue with men, what licence does this give to men? If
religion be reasonable controversy of this kind, what is the place of
doubt in it? Is not doubt man's side of the argument? Has he not also
questions to put--the Almighty from his side to arraign? For God has
Himself here put man on a level with Him, saying, _Come, and let us
reason together_.
A temper of this kind, though not strange to the Old Testament, lies
beyond the horizon of Isaiah. The only challenge of the Almighty which
in any of his prophecies he reports as rising from his own countrymen is
the bravado of certain drunkards (chaps. v. and xxviii.). Here and
elsewhere it is the very opposite temper from honest doubt which he
indicts--the temper that _does not know_, that _does not consider_.
Ritualism and sensualism are to Isaiah equally false, because equally
unthinking. The formalist and the fleshly he classes together, because
of their stupidity. What does it matter whether a man's conscience and
intellect be stifled in his own fat or under the clothes with which he
dresses himself? They are stifled, and that is the main thing. To the
formalist Isaiah says, _Israel doth not know, my people doth not
consider_; to the fleshly (chap. v.), _My people are gone into captivity
for want of knowledge._ But _knowing_ and _considering_ are just that of
which doubt, in its modern sense, is the abundance, and not the defect.
The mobility of mind, the curiosity, the moral sensitiveness, the hunger
that is not satisfied with the chaff of formal and unreal answers, the
spirit to find out truth for one's self, wrestling with God--this is the
very temper Isaiah would have welcomed in a people whose sluggishness
of reason was as justly blamed by him as the grossness of their moral
sense. And if revelation be of the form in which Isaiah so prominently
sets it, and the whole Bible bears him out in this--if revelation be
this argumentative and reasonable process, then human doubt has its part
in revelation. It is, indeed, man's side of the argument, and as history
shows, has often helped to the elucidation of the points at issue.
Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiah's horizon.
He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern
habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, _to
know_ and _to consider_--viz., as instruments of moral search and
conviction. Had he lived now he would have been found among those few
great prophets who use the resources of the human intellect to expose
the moral state of humanity; who, like Shakespeare and Hugo, turn man's
detective and reflective processes upon his own conduct; who make
himself stand at the bar of his conscience. And truly to have doubt of
everything in heaven and earth, and never to doubt one's self, is to be
guilty of as stiff and stupid a piece of self-righteousness as the
religious formalists whom Isaiah exposes. But the moral of the chapter
is plainly what we have shown it to be, that a man cannot stifle doubt
and debate about his own heart or treatment of God; whatever else he
thinks about and judges, he cannot help judging himself.
_Note on the Place of Nature in the Argument of the Lord._--The office
which the Bible assigns to Nature in the controversy of God with man is
fourfold--Assessor, Witness, Man's Fellow-Convict, and Doomster or
Executioner. Taking these backward:--1. Scripture frequently exhibits
Nature as the _doomster of the Lord_. Nature has a terrible power of
flashing back from her vaster surfaces the guilty impressions of man's
heart; at the last day her thunders shall peal the doom of the wicked,
and her fire devour them. In those prophecies of the book of Isaiah
which relate to his own time this use is not made of Nature, unless it
be in his very earliest prophecy in chap. ii., and in his references to
the earthquake (v. 25). To Isaiah the sentences and scourges of God are
political and historical, the threats and arms of Assyria. He employs
the violences of Nature only as metaphors for Assyrian rage and force.
But he often promises fertility as the effect of the Lord's pardon, and
when the prophets are writing about Nature, it is difficult to say
whether they are to be understood literally or poetically. But, at any
rate, there is much larger use made of physical catastrophes and
convulsions in those other prophecies which do not relate to Isaiah's
own time, and are now generally thought not to be his. Compare chaps.
xiii. and xiv. 2. The representation of the earth as the
_fellow-convict_ of guilty man, sharing his curse, is very vivid in
Isaiah xxiv.-xxvii. In the prophecies relating to his own time Isaiah,
of course, identifies the troubles that afflict the land with the sin of
the people, of Judah. But these are due to political causes--viz., the
Assyrian invasion. 3. In the Lord's court of judgement the prophets
sometimes employ Nature as _a witness_ against man, as, for instance,
the prophet Micah (vi. 1, _ff_). Nature is full of associations; the
enduring mountains have memories from old, they have been constant
witnesses of the dealing of God with His people. 4. Or lastly, Nature
may be used as the great _assessor_ of the conscience, sitting to
expound the principles on which God governs life. This is Isaiah's
favourite use of Nature. He employs her to corroborate his statement of
the Divine law and illustrate the ways of God to men, as in the end of
chap. xxviii., and no doubt in the opening verse of this chapter.
CHAPTER II.
_THE THREE JERUSALEMS._
ISAIAH ii.-iv. (740-735 B.C.).
After the general introduction, in chap. i., to the prophecies of
Isaiah, there comes another portion of the book, of greater length, but
nearly as distinct as the first. It covers four chapters, the second to
the sixth, all of them dating from the same earliest period of Isaiah's
ministry, before 735 B.C. They deal with exactly the same subjects, but
they differ greatly in form. One section (chaps. ii.-iv.) consists of a
number of short utterances--evidently not all spoken at the same time,
for they conflict with one another--a series of consecutive prophecies,
that probably represent the stages of conviction through which Isaiah
passed in his prophetic apprenticeship; a second section (chap. v.) is a
careful and artistic restatement, in parable and oration, of the truths
he has thus attained; while a third section (chap. vi.) is narrative,
probably written subsequently to the first two, but describing an
inspiration and official call, which must have preceded them both. The
more one examines chaps. ii.-vi., and finds that they but express the
same truths in different forms, the more one is confirmed in some such
view of them as this, which, it is believed, the following exposition
will justify. Chaps. v. and vi. are twin appendices to the long summary
in ii.-iv.: chap. v. a public vindication and enforcement of the results
of that summary, chap. vi. a private vindication to the prophet's heart
of the very same truths, by a return to the secret moment of their
original inspiration. We may assign 735 B.C., just before or just after
the accession of Ahaz, as the date of the latest of these prophecies.
The following is their historical setting.
For more than half a century the kingdom of Judah, under two powerful
and righteous monarchs, had enjoyed the greatest prosperity. Uzziah
strengthened the borders, extended the supremacy and vastly increased
the resources of his little State, which, it is well to remember, was in
its own size not larger than three average Scottish counties. He won
back for Judah the port of Elath on the Red Sea, built a navy, and
restored the commerce with the far East, which Solomon began. He
overcame, in battle or by the mere terror of his name, the neighbouring
nations--the Philistines that dwelt in cities, and the wandering tribes
of desert Arabs. The Ammonites brought him gifts. With the wealth, which
the East by tribute or by commerce poured into his little principality,
Uzziah fortified his borders and his capital, undertook large works of
husbandry and irrigation, organized a powerful standing army, and
supplied it with a siege artillery capable of slinging arrows and
stones. _His name spread far abroad, for he was marvellously helped till
he was strong._ His son Jotham (740-735 B.C.) continued his father's
policy with nearly all his father's success. He built cities and
castles, quelled a rebellion among his tributaries, and caused their
riches to flow faster still into Jerusalem. But while Jotham bequeathed
to his country a sure defence and great wealth, and to his people a
strong spirit and prestige among the nations, he left another bequest,
which robbed these of their value--the son who succeeded him. In 735
Jotham died and Ahaz became king. He was very young, and stepped to the
throne from the hareem. He brought to the direction of the government
the petulant will of a spoiled child, the mind of an intriguing and
superstitious woman. It was when the national policy felt the paralysis
consequent on these that Isaiah published at least the later part of the
prophecies now marked off as chaps. ii.-iv. of his book. _My people_, he
cries--_my people! children are their oppressors, and women rule over
them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy
the way of thy paths._
Isaiah had been born into the flourishing nation while Uzziah was king.
The great events of that monarch's reign were his education, the still
grander hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy. He must
have absorbed as the very temper of his youth this national
consciousness which swelled so proudly in Judah under Uzziah. But the
accession of such a king as Ahaz, while it was sure to let loose the
passions and follies fostered by a period of rapid increase in luxury,
could not fail to afford to Judah's enemies the long-deferred
opportunity of attacking her. It was an hour both of the manifestation
of sin and of the judgement of sin--an hour in which, while the majesty
of Judah, sustained through two great reigns, was about to disappear in
the follies of a third, the majesty of Judah's God should become more
conspicuous than ever. Of this Isaiah had been privately conscious, as
we shall see, for five years. _In the year that king Uzziah died_
(740), the young Jew _saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and
lifted up_. Startled into prophetic consciousness by the awful contrast
between an earthly majesty that had so long fascinated men, but now sank
into a leper's grave, and the heavenly, which rose sovereign and
everlasting above it, Isaiah had gone on to receive conviction of his
people's sin and certain punishment. With the accession of Ahaz, five
years later, his own political experience was so far developed as to
permit of his expressing in their exact historical effects the awful
principles of which he had received foreboding when Uzziah died. What we
find in chaps. ii.-iv. is a record of the struggle of his mind towards
this expression; it is the summary, as we have already said, of Isaiah's
apprenticeship.
_The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and
Jerusalem._ We do not know anything of Isaiah's family or of the details
of his upbringing. He was a member of some family of Jerusalem, and in
intimate relations with the Court. It has been believed that he was of
royal blood, but it matters little whether this be true or not. A spirit
so wise and masterful as his did not need social rank to fit it for that
intimacy with princes which has doubtless suggested the legend of his
royal descent. What does matter is Isaiah's citizenship in Jerusalem,
for this colours all his prophecy. More than Athens to Demosthenes, Rome
to Juvenal, Florence to Dante, is Jerusalem to Isaiah. She is his
immediate and ultimate regard, the centre and return of all his
thoughts, the hinge of the history of his time, the one thing worth
preserving amidst its disasters, the summit of those brilliant hopes
with which he fills the future. He has traced for us the main features
of her position and some of the lines of her construction, many of the
great figures of her streets, the fashions of her women, the arrival of
embassies, the effect of rumours. He has painted her aspect in triumph,
in siege, in famine and in earthquake; war filling her valleys with
chariots, and again nature rolling tides of fruitfulness up to her
gates; her moods of worship and panic and profligacy--till we see them
all as clearly as the shadow following the sunshine and the breeze
across the cornfields of our own summers.
If he takes wider observation of mankind, Jerusalem is his watch-tower.
It is for her defence he battles through fifty years of statesmanship,
and all his prophecy may be said to travail in anguish for her new
birth. He was never away from her walls, but not even the psalms of the
captives by the rivers of Babylon, with the desire of exile upon them,
exhibit more beauty and pathos than the lamentations which Isaiah poured
upon Jerusalem's sufferings or the visions in which he described her
future solemnity and peace.
It is not with surprise, therefore, that we find the first prophecies of
Isaiah directed upon his mother city: _The word that Isaiah the son of
Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem._ There is little about Judah in
these chapters: the country forms but a fringe to the capital.
Before we look into the subject of the prophecy, however, a short
digression is necessary on the manner in which it is presented to us. It
is not a reasoned composition or argument we have here; it is a vision,
it is the word which Isaiah _saw_. The expression is vague, often abused
and in need of defining. Vision is not employed here to express any
magical display before the eyes of the prophet of the very words which
he was to speak to the people, or any communication to his thoughts by
dream or ecstasy. They are higher qualities of "vision" which these
chapters unfold. There is, first of all, the power of forming an ideal,
of seeing and describing a thing in the fulfilment of all the promise
that is in it. But these prophecies are much more remarkable for two
other powers of inward vision, to which we give the names of insight and
intuition--insight into human character, intuition of Divine
principles--_clear knowledge of what man is and how God will act_--a
keen discrimination of the present state of affairs in Judah, and
unreasoned conviction of moral truth and the Divine will. The original
meaning of the Hebrew word _saw_, which is used in the title to this
series, is to cleave, or split; then to see into, to see through, to get
down beneath the surface of things and discover their real nature. And
what characterizes the bulk of these visions is _penetrativeness_, the
keenness of a man who will not be deceived by an outward show that he
delights to hold up to our scorn, but who has a conscience for the inner
worth of things and for their future consequences. To lay stress on the
moral meaning of the prophet's vision is not to grudge, but to emphasize
its inspiration by God. Of that inspiration Isaiah was himself assured.
It was God's Spirit that enabled him to see thus keenly; for he saw
things keenly, not only as men count moral keenness, but as God Himself
sees them, in their value in His sight and in their attractiveness for
His love and pity. In this prophecy there occurs a striking
expression--_the eyes of the glory of God_. It was the vision of the
Almighty Searcher and Judge, burning through man's pretence, with which
the prophet felt himself endowed. This then was the second element in
his vision--to penetrate men's hearts as God Himself penetrated them,
and constantly, without squint or blur, to see right from wrong in their
eternal difference. And the third element is the intuition of God's
will, the perception of what line of action He will take. This last, of
course, forms the distinct prerogative of Hebrew prophecy, that power of
vision which is its climax; the moral situation being clear, to see then
how God will act upon it.
Under these three powers of vision Jerusalem, the prophet's city, is
presented to us--Jerusalem in three lights, really three Jerusalems.
First, there is flashed out (chap. ii. 2-5) a vision of the ideal city,
Jerusalem idealized and glorified. Then comes (ii. 6-iv. 1) a very
realistic picture, a picture of the actual Jerusalem. And lastly at the
close of the prophecy (iv. 2-6) we have a vision of Jerusalem as she
shall be after God has taken her in hand--very different indeed from the
ideal with which the prophet began. Here are three successive motives or
phases of prophecy, which, as we have said, in all probability summarize
the early ministry of Isaiah, and present him to us _first_ as the
idealist or visionary, _second_ as the realist or critic, and _third_ as
the prophet proper or revealer of God's actual will.
I. THE IDEALIST (ii. 1-5).
All men who have shown our race how great things are possible have had
their inspiration in dreaming of the impossible. Reformers, who at death
were content to have lived for the moving forward but one inch of some
of their fellow-men, began by believing themselves able to lift the
whole world at once. Isaiah was no exception to this human fashion. His
first vision was that of a Utopia, and his first belief that his
countrymen would immediately realize it. He lifts up to us a very grand
picture of a vast commonwealth centred in Jerusalem. Some think he
borrowed it from an older prophet; Micah has it also; it may have been
the ideal of the age. But, at any rate, if we are not to take verse 5 in
scorn, Isaiah accepted this as his own. _And it shall come to pass in
the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be
established in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills,
and all nations shall flow unto it._ The prophet's own Jerusalem shall
be the light of the world, the school and temple of the earth, the seat
of the judgement of the Lord, when He shall reign over the nations, and
all mankind shall dwell in peace beneath Him. It is a glorious destiny,
and as its light shines from the far-off horizon, _the latter days_, in
which the prophet sees it, what wonder that he is possessed and cries
aloud, _O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the
LORD!_ It seems to the young prophet's hopeful heart as if at once that
ideal would be realized, as if by his own word he could lift his people
to its fulfilment.
But that is impossible, and Isaiah perceives so as soon as he turns from
the far-off horizon to the city at his feet, as soon as he leaves
to-morrow alone and deals with to-day. The next verses of the
chapter--from verse 6 onwards--stand in strong contrast to those which
have described Israel's ideal. There Zion is full of the law and
Jerusalem of the word of the Lord, the one religion flowing over from
this centre upon the world. Here into the actual Jerusalem they have
brought all sorts of foreign worship and heathen prophets; _they are
replenished from the East, and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and
strike hands with the children of strangers_. There all nations come to
worship at Jerusalem; here her thought and faith are scattered over the
idolatries of all nations. The ideal Jerusalem is full of spiritual
blessings, the actual of the spoils of trade. There the swords are beat
into ploughshares and the spears into pruning-hooks; here are vast and
novel armaments, horses and chariots. There the Lord alone is
worshipped; here the city is crowded with idols. The real Jerusalem
could not possibly be more different from the ideal, nor its inhabitants
as they are from what their prophet had confidently called on them to
be.
II. THE REALIST (ii. 6-iv. 1).
Therefore Isaiah's attitude and tone suddenly change. The visionary
becomes a realist, the enthusiast a cynic, the seer of the glorious city
of God the prophet of God's judgement. The recoil is absolute in style,
temper and thought, down to the very figures of speech which he uses.
Before, Isaiah had seen, as it were, a lifting process at work,
_Jerusalem in the top of the mountains, and exalted above the hills_.
Now he beholds nothing but depression. _For the day of the LORD of hosts
shall be upon every one that is proud and haughty, upon all that is
lifted up, and it shall be brought low, and the Lord alone shall be
exalted in that day._ Nothing in the great civilization, which he had
formerly glorified, is worth preserving. The high towers, fenced walls,
ships of Tarshish, treasures and armour must all perish, even the hills
lifted by his imagination shall be bowed down, and _the LORD alone be
exalted in that day_. This recoil reaches its extreme in the last verse
of the chapter. The prophet, who had believed so much in man as to think
possible an immediate commonwealth of nations, believes in man now so
little that he does not hold him worth preserving: _Cease ye from man,
whose breath is in his nostrils; for wherein is he to be accounted of?_
Attached to this general denunciation are some satiric descriptions, in
the third chapter, of the anarchy, to which society in Jerusalem is fast
being reduced under its childish and effeminate king. The scorn of these
passages is scathing; _the eyes of the glory of God_ burn through every
rank, fashion and ornament in the town. King and court are not spared;
the elders and princes are rigorously denounced. But by far the most
striking effort of the prophet's boldness is his prediction of the
overthrow of Jerusalem itself (ver. 8). What it cost Isaiah to utter and
the people to hear we can only partly measure. To his own passionate
patriotism it must have felt like treason, to the blind optimism of the
popular religion it doubtless appeared the rankest heresy--to aver that
the holy city, inviolate and almost unthreatened since the day David
brought to her the ark of the Lord, and destined by the voice of her
prophets, including Isaiah himself, to be established upon the tops of
the mountains, was now to fall into ruin. But Isaiah's conscience
overcomes his sense of consistency, and he who has just proclaimed the
eternal glory of Jerusalem is provoked by his knowledge of her citizens'
sins to recall his words and intimate her destruction. It may have been,
that Isaiah was partly emboldened to so novel a threat, by his knowledge
of the preparations which Syria and Israel were already making for the
invasion of Judah. The prospect of Jerusalem, as the centre of a vast
empire subject to Jehovah, however natural it was under a successful
ruler like Uzziah, became, of course, unreal when every one of Uzziah's
and Jotham's tributaries had risen in revolt against their successor,
Ahaz. But of these outward movements Isaiah tells us nothing. He is
wholly engrossed with Judah's sin. It is his growing acquaintance with
the corruption of his fellow-countrymen that has turned his back on the
ideal city of his opening ministry, and changed him into a prophet of
Jerusalem's ruin. _Their tongue and their doings are against the Lord,
to provoke the eyes of His glory._ Judge, prophet and elder, all the
upper ranks and useful guides of the people, must perish. It is a sign
of the degradation to which society shall be reduced, when Isaiah with
keen sarcasm pictures the despairing people choosing a certain man to be
their ruler because he alone has a coat to his back! (iii. 6).
With increased scorn Isaiah turns lastly upon the women of Jerusalem
(iii. 16-iv. 2), and here perhaps the change which has passed over him
since his opening prophecy is most striking. One likes to think of how
the citizens of Jerusalem took this alteration in their prophet's
temper. We know how popular so optimist a prophecy as that of the
mountain of the Lord's house must have been, and can imagine how men and
women loved the young face, bright with a far-off light, and the dream
of an ideal that had no quarrel with the present. "But what a change is
this that has come over him, who speaks not of to-morrow, but of to-day,
who has brought his gaze from those distant horizons to our streets, who
stares every man in the face (iii. 9), and makes the women feel that no
pin and trimming, no ring and bracelet, escape his notice! Our loved
prophet has become an impudent scorner!" Ah, men and women of Jerusalem,
beware of those eyes! _The glory of God_ is burning in them; they see
you through and through, and they tell us that all your armour and the
_show of your countenance_, and your foreign fashions are as nothing,
for there are corrupt hearts below. This is your judgement, that
_instead of sweet spices there shall be rottenness, and instead of a
girdle a rope, and instead of well-set hair baldness, and instead of a
stomacher a girding of sackcloth, and branding instead of beauty_. _Thy
men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her gates
shall lament and mourn, and she shall be desolate and sit upon the
ground!_
This was the climax of the prophet's judgement. If the salt have lost
its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for
nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot. If the women are
corrupt the state is moribund.
III. _The Prophet of the Lord_ (iv. 2-6).
Is there, then, no hope for Jerusalem? Yes, but not where the prophet
sought it at first, in herself, and not in the way he offered it--by the
mere presentation of an ideal. There is hope, there is more--there is
certain salvation in the Lord, but it only comes after judgement.
Contrast that opening picture of the new Jerusalem with this closing
one, and we shall find their difference to lie in two things. There the
city is more prominent than the Lord, here the Lord is more prominent
than the city; there no word of judgement, here judgement sternly
emphasized as the indispensable way towards the blessed future. A more
vivid sense of the Person of Jehovah Himself, a deep conviction of the
necessity of chastisement: these are what Isaiah has gained during his
early ministry, without losing hope or heart for the future. The bliss
shall come only when the Lord shall _have washed away the filth of the
daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the
midst thereof by the spirit of judgement and the spirit of burning_. It
is a corollary of all this that the participants of that future shall be
many fewer than in the first vision of the prophet. The process of
judgement must weed men out, and in place of all nations coming to
Jerusalem, to share its peace and glory, the prophet can speak now only
of Israel--and only of a remnant of Israel. _The escaped of Israel, the
left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem._ This is a great
change in Isaiah's ideal, from the supremacy of Israel over all nations
to the bare survival of a remnant of his people.
* * * * *
Is there not in this threefold vision a parallel and example for our own
civilisation and our thoughts about it? All work and wisdom begin in
dreams. We must see our Utopias before we start to build our stone and
lime cities.
"It takes a soul
To move a body; it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses even to a cleaner stye;
It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside
The dust of the actual."
But the light of our ideals dawns upon us only to show how poor by
nature are the mortals who are called to accomplish them. The ideal
rises still as to Isaiah only to exhibit the poverty of the real. When
we lift our eyes from the hills of vision, and rest them on our
fellow-men, hope and enthusiasm die out of us. Isaiah's disappointment
is that of every one who brings down his gaze from the clouds to the
streets. Be our ideal ever so desirable, be we ever so persuaded of its
facility, the moment we attempt to apply it we shall be undeceived.
Society cannot be regenerated all at once. There is an expression which
Isaiah emphasizes in his motive of cynicism: _The show of their
countenance doth witness against them._ It tells us that when he called
his countrymen to turn to the light he lifted upon them he saw nothing
but the exhibition of their sin made plain. When we bring light to a
cavern whose inhabitants have lost their eyes by the darkness, the light
does not make them see; we have to give them eyes again. Even so no
vision or theory of a perfect state--the mistake which all young
reformers make--can regenerate society. It will only reveal social
corruption, and sicken the heart of the reformer himself. For the
possession of a great ideal does not mean, as so many fondly imagine,
work accomplished; it means work revealed--work revealed so vast, often
so impossible, that faith and hope die down, and the enthusiast of
yesterday becomes the cynic of to-morrow. _Cease ye from man, whose
breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted?_ In this
despair, through which every worker for God and man must pass, many a
warm heart has grown cold, many an intellect become paralyzed. There is
but one way of escape, and that is Isaiah's. It is to believe in God
Himself; it is to believe that He is at work, that His purposes to man
are saving purposes, and that with Him there is an inexhaustible source
of mercy and virtue. So from the blackest pessimism shall arise new hope
and faith, as from beneath Isaiah's darkest verses that glorious passage
suddenly bursts like uncontrollable spring from the very feet of winter.
_For that day shall the spring of the LORD be beautiful and glorious,
and the fruit of the land shall be excellent and comely for them that
are escaped of Israel._ This is all it is possible to say. There must be
a future for man, because God loves him, and God reigns. That future can
be reached only through judgement, because God is righteous.
To put it another way: All of us who live to work for our fellow-men or
who hope to lift them higher by our word begin with our own visions of a
great future. These visions, though our youth lends to them an original
generosity and enthusiasm, are, like Isaiah's, largely borrowed. The
progressive instincts of the age into which we are born and the mellow
skies of prosperity combine with our own ardour to make our ideal one of
splendour. Persuaded of its facility, we turn to real life to apply it.
A few years pass. We not only find mankind too stubborn to be forced
into our moulds, but we gradually become aware of Another Moulder at
work upon our subject, and we stand aside in awe to watch His
operations. Human desires and national ideals are not always fulfilled;
philosophic theories are discredited by the evolution of fact. Uzziah
does not reign for ever; the sceptre falls to Ahaz: progress is checked,
and the summer of prosperity draws to an end. Under duller skies
ungilded judgement comes to view, cruel and inexorable, crushing even
the peaks on which we built our future, yet purifying men and giving
earnest of a better future, too. And so life, that mocked the control of
our puny fingers, bends groaning to the weight of an Almighty Hand. God
also, we perceive as we face facts honestly, has His ideal for men; and
though He works so slowly towards His end that our restless eyes are too
impatient to follow His order, He yet reveals all that shall be to the
humbled heart and the soul emptied of its own visions. Awed and
chastened, we look back from His Presence to our old ideals. We are
still able to recognize their grandeur and generous hope for men. But we
see now how utterly unconnected they are with the present--castles in
the air, with no ladders to them from the earth. And even if they were
accessible, still to our eyes, purged by gazing on God's own ways, they
would no more appear desirable. Look back on Isaiah's early ideal from
the light of his second vision of the future. For all its grandeur, that
picture of Jerusalem is not wholly attractive. Is there not much
national arrogance in it? Is it not just the imperfectly idealized
reflection of an age of material prosperity such as that of Uzziah's
was? Pride is in it, a false optimism, the highest good to be reached
without moral conflict. But here is the language of pity, rescue with
difficulty, rest only after sore struggle and stripping, salvation by
the bare arm of God. So do our imaginations for our own future or for
that of the race always contrast with what He Himself has in store for
us, promised freely out of His great grace to our unworthy hearts, yet
granted in the end only to those who pass towards it through discipline,
tribulation and fire.
* * * * *
This, then, was Isaiah's apprenticeship, and its net result was to leave
him with the remnant for his ideal: the remnant and Jerusalem secured as
its rallying-point.
CHAPTER III.
_THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD, OR TRUE PATRIOTISM THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR
COUNTRY'S SINS._
ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4 (735 _B.C._).
The prophecy contained in these chapters belongs, as we have seen, to
the same early period of Isaiah's career as chapters ii.-iv., about the
time when Ahaz ascended the throne after the long and successful reigns
of his father and grandfather, when the kingdom of Judah seemed girt
with strength and filled with wealth, but the men were corrupt and the
women careless, and the earnest of approaching judgement was already
given in the incapacity of the weak and woman-ridden king. Yet although
this new prophecy issues from the same circumstances as its
predecessors, it implies these circumstances a little more developed.
The same social evils are treated, but by a hand with a firmer grasp of
them. The same principles are emphasized--the righteousness of Jehovah
and His activity in judgement--but the form of judgement of which Isaiah
had spoken before in general terms looms nearer, and before the end of
the prophecy we get a view at close quarters of the Assyrian ranks.
Besides, opposition has arisen to the prophet's teaching. We saw that
the obscurities and inconsistencies of chapters ii.-iv. are due to the
fact that that prophecy represents several stages of experience through
which Isaiah passed before he gained his final convictions. But his
countrymen, it appears, have now had time to turn on these convictions
and call them in question: it is necessary for Isaiah to vindicate them.
The difference, then, between these two sets of prophecies, dealing with
the same things, is that in the former (chapters ii.-iv.), we have the
obscure and tortuous path of a conviction struggling to light in the
prophet's own experience; here, in chapter v., we have its careful array
in the light and before the people.
The point of Isaiah's teaching against which opposition was directed was
of course its main point, that God was about to abandon Judah. This must
have appeared to the popular religion of the day as the rankest heresy.
To the Jews the honour of Jehovah was bound up with the inviolability of
Jerusalem and the prosperity of Judah. But Isaiah knew Jehovah to be
infinitely more concerned for the purity of His people than for their
prosperity. He had seen the LORD _exalted in righteousness_ above those
national and earthly interests, with which vulgar men exclusively
identified His will. Did the people appeal to the long time Jehovah had
graciously led them for proof that He would not abandon them now? To
Isaiah that gracious leading was but for righteousness' sake, and that
God might make His own a holy people. Their history, so full of the
favours of the Almighty, did not teach Isaiah as it did the common
prophets of his time, the lesson of Israel's political security, but the
far different one of their religious responsibility. To him it only
meant what Amos had already put in those startling words, _You only have
I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will visit upon
you all your iniquities_. Now Isaiah delivered this doctrine at a time
when it brought him the hostility of men's passions as well as of their
opinions. Judah was arming for war. Syria and Ephraim were marching upon
her. To threaten his country with ruin in such an hour was to run the
risk of suffering from popular fury as a traitor as well as from
priestly prejudice as a heretic. The strain of the moment is felt in the
strenuousness of the prophecy. Chapter v., with its appendix, exhibits
more grasp and method than its predecessors. Its literary form is
finished, its feeling clear. There is a tenderness in the beginning of
it, an inexorableness in the end and an eagerness all through, which
stamp the chapter as Isaiah's final appeal to his countrymen at this
period of his career.
The chapter is a noble piece of patriotism--one of the noblest of a race
who, although for the greater part of their history without a
fatherland, have contributed more brilliantly than perhaps any other to
the literature of patriotism, and that simply because, as Isaiah here
illustrates, patriotism was to their prophets identical with religious
privilege and responsibility. Isaiah carries this to its bitter end.
Other patriots have wept to sing their country's woes; Isaiah's burden
is his people's guilt. To others an invasion of their fatherland by its
enemies has been the motive to rouse by song or speech their countrymen
to repel it. Isaiah also hears the tramp of the invader; but to him is
permitted no ardour of defence, and his message to his countrymen is
that they must succumb, for the invasion is irresistible and of the very
judgement of God. How much it cost the prophet to deliver such a message
we may see from those few verses of it in which his heart is not
altogether silenced by his conscience. The sweet description of Judah
as a vineyard, and the touching accents that break through the roll of
denunciation with such phrases as _My people are gone away into
captivity unawares_, tell us how the prophet's love of country is
struggling with his duty to a righteous God. The course of feeling
throughout the prophecy is very striking. The tenderness of the opening
lyric seems ready to flow into gentle pleading with the whole people.
But as the prophet turns to particular classes and their sins his mood
changes to indignation, the voice settles down to judgement; till when
it issues upon that clear statement of the coming of the Northern hosts
every trace of emotion has left it, and the sentences ring out as
unfaltering as the tramp of the armies they describe.
I. THE PARABLE OF THE VINEYARD (v. 1-7).
Isaiah adopts the resource of every misunderstood and unpopular teacher,
and seeks to turn the flank of his people's prejudices by an attack in
parable on their sympathies. Did they stubbornly believe it impossible
for God to abandon a State He had so long and so carefully fostered? Let
them judge from an analogous case in which they were all experts. In a
picture of great beauty Isaiah describes a vineyard upon one of the
sunny promontories visible from Jerusalem. Every care had been given it
of which an experienced vine-dresser could think, but it brought forth
only wild grapes. The vine-dresser himself is introduced, and appeals to
the men of Judah and Jerusalem to judge between him and his vineyard. He
gets their assent that all had been done which could be done, and
fortified with that resolves to abandon the vineyard. _I will lay it
waste; it shall not be pruned nor digged, but there shall come up briers
and thorns._ Then the stratagem comes out, the speaker drops the tones
of a human cultivator, and in the omnipotence of the Lord of heaven he
is heard to say, _I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain
upon it_. This diversion upon their sympathies having succeeded, the
prophet scarcely needs to charge the people's prejudices in face. His
point has been evidently carried. _For the vineyard of Jehovah of hosts
is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah his pleasant plant; and He
looked for judgement, but behold oppression, for righteousness, but
behold a cry._
The lesson enforced by Isaiah is just this, that in a people's
civilization there lie the deepest responsibilities, for that is neither
more nor less than their cultivation by God; and the question for a
people is not how secure does this render them, nor what does it count
for glory, but how far is it rising towards the intentions of its
Author? Does it produce those fruits of righteousness for which alone
God cares to set apart and cultivate the peoples? On this depends the
question whether the civilization is secure, as well as the right of the
people to enjoy and feel proud of it. There cannot be true patriotism
without sensitiveness to this, for however rich be the elements that
compose the patriot's temper, as piety towards the past, ardour of
service for the present, love of liberty, delight in natural beauty and
gratitude for Divine favour, so rich a temper will grow rancid without
the salt of conscience; and the richer the temper is, the greater must
be the proportion of that salt. All prophets and poets of patriotism
have been moralists and satirists as well. From Demosthenes to
Tourgenieff, from Dante to Mazzini, from Milton to Russell Lowell, from
Burns to Heine, one cannot recall any great patriot who has not known
how to use the scourge as well as the trumpet. Many opportunities will
present themselves to us of illustrating Isaiah's orations by the
letters and speeches of Cromwell, who of moderns most resembles the
statesman-prophet of Judah; but nowhere does the resemblance become so
close as when we lay a prophecy like this of Jehovah's vineyard by the
side of the speeches in which the Lord Protector exhorted the Commons of
England, although it was the hour of his and their triumph, to address
themselves to their sins.
So, then, the patriotism of all great men has carried a conscience for
their country's sins. But while this is always more or less a burden to
the true patriot, there are certain periods in which his care for his
country ought to be this predominantly, and need be little else. In a
period like our own, for instance, of political security and fashionable
religion, what need is there in patriotic displays of any other kind?
but how much for patriotism of this kind--of men who will uncover the
secret sins, however loathsome, and declare the hypocrisies, however
powerful, of the social life of the people! These are the patriots we
need in times of peace; and as it is more difficult to rouse a torpid
people to their sins than to lead a roused one against their enemies,
and harder to face a whole people with the support only of conscience
than to defy many nations if you but have your own at your back, so
these patriots of peace are more to be honoured than those of war. But
there is one kind of patriotism more arduous and honourable still. It is
that which Isaiah displays here, who cannot add to his conscience hope
or even pity, who must hail his country's enemies for his country's
good, and recite the long roll of God's favours to his nation only to
emphasize the justice of His abandonment of them.
II. THE WILD GRAPES OF JUDAH (v. 8-24).
The _wild grapes_ which Isaiah saw in the vineyard of the Lord he
catalogues in a series of Woes (vv. 8-24), fruits all of them of love of
money and love of wine. They are abuse of the soil (8-10, 17[4]), a
giddy luxury which has taken to drink (11-16), a moral blindness and
headlong audacity of sin which habitual avarice and drunkenness soon
develop (18-21), and, again, a greed of drink and money--men's
perversion of their strength to wine, and of their opportunities of
justice to the taking of bribes (22-24). These are the features of
corrupt civilization not only in Judah, and the voice that deplores them
cannot speak without rousing others very clamant to the modern
conscience. It is with remarkable persistence that in every civilization
the two main passions of the human heart, love of wealth and love of
pleasure, the instinct to gather and the instinct to squander, have
sought precisely these two forms denounced by Isaiah in which to work
their social havoc--appropriation of the soil and indulgence in strong
drink. Every civilized community develops sooner or later its
land-question and its liquor-question. "Questions" they are called by
the superficial opinion that all difficulties may be overcome by the
cleverness of men; yet problems through which there cries for remedy so
vast a proportion of our poverty, crime and madness, are something worse
than "questions." They are huge sins, and require not merely the
statesman's wit, but all the penitence and zeal of which a nation's
conscience is capable. It is in this that the force of Isaiah's
treatment lies. We feel he is not facing questions of State, but sins of
men. He has nothing to tell us of what he considers the best system of
land tenure, but he enforces the principle that in the ease with which
land may be absorbed by one person the natural covetousness of the human
heart has a terrible opportunity for working ruin upon society. _Woe
unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there
be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land._ We
know from Micah that the actual process which Isaiah condemns was
carried out with the most cruel evictions and disinheritances. Isaiah
does not touch on its methods, but exposes its effects on the
country--depopulation and barrenness,--and emphasizes its religious
significance. _Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and
fair, without an inhabitant. For ten acres of vineyard shall yield one
bath, and a homer of seed shall yield but an ephah.... Then shall
lambs feed as in their pasture, and strangers shall devour the ruins of
the fat ones--i.e._, of the luxurious landowners (9, 10, 17. See note
on previous page). And in one of those elliptic statements by which he
often startles us with the sudden sense that God Himself is acquainted
with all our affairs, and takes His own interest in them, Isaiah adds,
"All this was whispered to me by Jehovah: _In mine ears--the LORD of
hosts_" (ver. 9).
[4] Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and should
be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe," where
it contributes to the development of the meaning far more than from
where it stands in the text.
During recent agitations in our own country one has often seen the "land
laws of the Bible" held forth by some thoughtless demagogue as models
for land tenure among ourselves; as if a system which worked well with a
small tribe in a land they had all entered on equal footing, and where
there was no opportunity for the industry of the people except in
pasture and tillage, could possibly be applicable to a vastly larger and
more complex population, with different traditions and very different
social circumstances. Isaiah says nothing about the peculiar land _laws_
of his people. He lays down principles, and these are principles valid
in every civilization. God has made the land, not to feed the pride of
the few, but the natural hunger of the many, and it is His will that the
most be got out of a country's soil for the people of the country.
Whatever be the system of land-tenure--and while all are more or less
liable to abuse, it is the duty of a people to agitate for that which
will be least liable--if it is taken advantage of by individuals to
satisfy their own cupidity, then God will take account of them. There is
a responsibility which the State cannot enforce, and the neglect of
which cannot be punished by any earthly law, but all the more will God
see to it. A nation's treatment of their land is not always prominent as
a question which demands the attention of public reformers; but it
ceaselessly has interest for God, who ever holds individuals to answer
for it. The land-question is ultimately a religious question. For the
management of their land the whole nation is responsible to God, but
especially those who own or manage estates. This is a sacred office.
When one not only remembers the nature of land--how it is an element of
life, so that if a man abuse the soil it is as if he poisoned the air or
darkened the heavens--but appreciates also the multitude of personal
relations which the landowner or factor holds in his hand--the peace of
homes, the continuity of local traditions, the physical health, the
social fearlessness and frankness, and the thousand delicate
associations which their habitations entwine about the hearts of
men--one feels that to all who possess or manage land is granted an
opportunity of patriotism and piety open to few, a ministry less
honourable and sacred than none other committed by God to man for his
fellow-men.
After the land-sin Isaiah hurls his second Woe upon the drink-sin, and
it is a heavier woe than the first. With fatal persistence the luxury of
every civilization has taken to drink; and of all the indictments
brought by moralists against nations, that which they reserve for
drunkenness is, as here, the most heavily weighted. The crusade against
drink is not the novel thing that many imagine who observe only its late
revival among ourselves. In ancient times there was scarcely a State in
which prohibitive legislation of the most stringent kind was not
attempted, and generally carried out with a thoroughness more possible
under despots than where, as with us, the slow consent of public opinion
is necessary. A horror of strong drink has in every age possessed those
who from their position as magistrates or prophets have been able to
follow for any distance the drifts of social life. Isaiah exposes as
powerfully as ever any of them did in what the peculiar fatality of
drinking lies. Wine is a mocker by nothing more than by the moral
incredulity which it produces, enabling men to hide from themselves the
spiritual and material effects of over-indulgence in it. No one who has
had to do with persons slowly falling from moderate to immoderate
drinking can mistake Isaiah's meaning when he says, _They regard not the
work of the LORD; neither have they considered the operation of His
hands_. Nothing kills the conscience like steady drinking to a little
excess; and religion, even while the conscience is alive, acts on it
only as an opiate. It is not, however, with the symptoms of drink in
individuals so much as with its aggregate effects on the nation that
Isaiah is concerned. So prevalent is excessive drinking, so entwined
with the social customs of the country and many powerful interests, that
it is extremely difficult to rouse public opinion to its effects. And
_so they go into captivity for lack of knowledge_. Temperance reformers
are often blamed for the strength of their language, but they may
shelter themselves behind Isaiah. As he pictures it, the national
destruction caused by drink is complete. It is nothing less than the
people's _captivity_, and we know what that meant to an Israelite. It
affects all classes: _Their honourable men are famished, and their
multitude parched with thirst.... The mean man is bowed down, and the
great man is humbled._ But the want and ruin of this earth are not
enough to describe it. The appetite of hell itself has to be enlarged to
suffice for the consumption of the spoils of strong drink. _Therefore
hell hath enlarged her desire and opened her mouth without measure; and
their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth
among them, descend into it._ The very appetite of hell has to be
enlarged! Does it not truly seem as if the wild and wanton waste of
drink were preventable, as if it were not, as many are ready to sneer,
the inevitable evil of men's hearts choosing this form of issue, but a
superfluous audacity of sin, which the devil himself did not desire or
tempt men to? It is this feeling of the infernal gratuitousness of most
of the drink-evil--the conviction that here hell would be quiet if only
she were not stirred up by the extraordinarily wanton provocatives that
society and the State offer to excessive drinking--which compels
temperance reformers at the present day to isolate drunkenness and make
it the object of a special crusade. Isaiah's strong figure has lost none
of its strength to-day. When our judges tell us from the bench that
nine-tenths of pauperism and crime are caused by drink, and our
physicians that if only irregular tippling were abolished half the
current sickness of the land would cease, and our statesmen that the
ravages of strong drink are equal to those of the historical scourges of
war, famine and pestilence combined, surely to swallow such a glut of
spoil _the appetite of hell must have been_ still more enlarged, _and
the mouth of hell made_ yet _wider_.
The next three Woes are upon different aggravations of that moral
perversity which the prophet has already traced to strong drink. In the
first of these it is better to read, _draw punishment near with cords of
vanity_, than _draw iniquity_. Then we have a striking antithesis--the
drunkards mocking Isaiah over their cups with the challenge, as if it
would not be taken up, _Let Jehovah make speed, and hasten His work of
judgement, that we may see it_, while all the time they themselves were
dragging that judgement near, _as with cart-ropes_, by their persistent
diligence in evil. This figure of sinners jeering at the approach of a
calamity while they actually wear the harness of its carriage is very
striking. But the Jews are not only unconscious of judgement, they are
confused as to the very principles of morality: _Who call evil good, and
good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put
bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!_
In his fifth Woe the prophet attacks a disposition to which his scorn
gives no peace throughout his ministry. If these sensualists had only
confined themselves to their sensuality they might have been left alone;
but with that intellectual bravado which is equally born with "Dutch
courage" of drink, they interfered in the conduct of the State, and
prepared arrogant policies of alliance and war that were the distress of
the sober-minded prophet all his days. _Woe unto them that are wise in
their own eyes and prudent in their own sight._
In his last Woe Isaiah returns to the drinking habits of the upper
classes, from which it would appear that among the judges even of Judah
there were "six-bottle men." They sustained their extravagance by
subsidies, which we trust were unknown to the mighty men of wine who
once filled the seats of justice in our own country. _They justify the
wicked for a bribe, and take away the righteousness of the righteous
from him._ All these sinners, dead through their rejection of the law of
Jehovah of hosts and the word of the Holy One of Israel, shall be like
to the stubble, fit only for burning, and their blossom as the dust of
the rotten tree.
III. THE ANGER OF THE LORD (v. 25; ix. 8-x. 4; v. 26-30).
This indictment of the various sins of the people occupies the whole of
the second part of the oration. But a third part is now added, in which
the prophet catalogues the judgements of the Lord upon them, each of
these closing with the weird refrain, _For all this His anger is not
turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. The complete
catalogue is usually obtained by inserting between the 25th and 26th
verses of chapter v. the long passage from chapter ix., ver. 8, to
chapter x., ver. 4. It is quite true that as far as chapter v. itself is
concerned it does not need this insertion; but ix. 8-x. 4 is decidedly
out of place where it now lies. Its paragraphs end with the same refrain
as closes v. 25, which forms, besides, a natural introduction to them,
while v. 26-30 form as natural a conclusion. The latter verses describe
an Assyrian invasion, and it was always in an Assyrian invasion that
Isaiah foresaw the final calamity of Judah. We may, then, subject to
further light on the exceedingly obscure subject of the arrangement of
Isaiah's prophecies, follow some of the leading critics, and place ix.
8-x. 4 between verses 25-26 of chapter v.; and the more we examine them
the more we shall be satisfied with our arrangement, for strung together
in this order they form one of the most impressive series of scenes
which even an Isaiah has given us.
From these scenes Isaiah has spared nothing that is terrible in history
or nature, and it is not one of the least of the arguments for putting
them together that their intensity increases to a climax. Earthquakes,
armed raids, a great battle and the slaughter of a people; prairie and
forest fires, civil strife and the famine fever, that feeds upon itself;
another battle-field, with its cringing groups of captives and heaps of
slain; the resistless tide of a great invasion; and then, for final
prospect, a desolate land by the sound of a hungry sea, and the light is
darkened in the clouds thereof. The elements of nature and the elemental
passions of man have been let loose together; and we follow the violent
floods, remembering that it is sin which has burst the gates of the
universe, and given the tides of hell full course through it. Over the
storm and battle there comes booming like the storm-bell the awful
refrain, _For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is
stretched out still._ It is poetry of the highest order, but in him who
reads it with a conscience mere literary sensations are sobered by the
awe of some of the most profound moral phenomena of life. The
persistence of Divine wrath, the long-lingering effects of sin in a
nation's history, man's abuse of sorrow and his defiance of an angry
Providence, are the elements of this great drama. Those who are familiar
with _King Lear_, will recognize these elements, and observe how
similarly the ways of Providence and the conduct of men are represented
there and here.
What Isaiah unfolds, then, is a series of calamities that have overtaken
the people of Israel. It is impossible for us to identify every one of
them with a particular event in Israel's history otherwise known to us.
Some it is not difficult to recognize; but the prophet passes in a
perplexing way from Judah to Ephraim and Ephraim to Judah, and in one
case, where he represents Samaria as attacked by Syria and the
Philistines, he goes back to a period at some distance from his own.
There are also passages, as for instance x. 1-4, in which we are unable
to decide whether he describes a present punishment or threatens a
future one. But his moral purpose, at least, is plain. He will show how
often Jehovah has already spoken to His people by calamity, and because
they have remained hardened under these warnings, how there now remains
possible only the last, worst blow of an Assyrian invasion. Isaiah is
justifying his threat of so unprecedented and extreme a punishment for
God's people as overthrow by this Northern people, who had just appeared
upon Judah's political horizon. God, he tells Israel, has tried
everything short of this, and it has failed; now only this remains, and
this shall not fail. The prophet's purpose, therefore, being not an
accurate historical recital, but moral impressiveness, he gives us a
more or less ideal description of former calamities, mentioning only so
much as to allow us to recognize here and there that it is actual facts
which he uses for his purpose of condemning Israel to captivity, and
vindicating Israel's God in bringing that captivity near. The passage
thus forms a parallel to that in Amos, with its similar refrain: _Yet ye
have not returned unto Me, saith the Lord_ (Amos iv. 6-12), and only
goes farther than that earlier prophecy in indicating that the
instruments of the Lord's final judgement are to be the Assyrians.
Five great calamities, says Isaiah, have fallen on Israel and left them
hardened: 1st, earthquake (v. 25); 2nd, loss of territory (ix. 8-12);
3rd, war and a decisive defeat (ix. 13-17); 4th, internal anarchy (ix.
18-21); 5th, the near prospect of captivity (x. 1-4).
1. THE EARTHQUAKE (v. 25).--Amos closes his series with an earthquake;
Isaiah begins with one. It may be the same convulsion they describe, or
may not. Although the skirts of Palestine both to the east and west
frequently tremble to these disturbances, an earthquake in Palestine
itself, up on the high central ridge of the land, is very rare. Isaiah
vividly describes its awful simplicity and suddenness. _The Lord
stretched forth His hand and smote, and the hills shook, and their
carcases were like offal in the midst of the streets._ More words are
not needed, because there was nothing more to describe. The Lord lifted
His hand; the hills seemed for a moment to topple over, and when the
living recovered from the shock there lay the dead, flung like refuse
about the streets.
2. THE LOSS OF TERRITORY (ix. 8-21).--So awful a calamity, in which the
dying did not die out of sight nor fall huddled together on some far off
battle-field, but the whole land was strewn with her slain, ought to
have left indelible impression on the people. But it did not. The Lord's
own word had been in it for Jacob and Israel (ix. 8), _that the people
might know, even Ephraim and the inhabitants of Samaria_. But unhumbled
they turned in the stoutness of their hearts, saying, when the
earthquake had passed:[5] _The bricks are fallen, but we will build with
hewn stones;[6] the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into
cedars_. Calamity did not make this people thoughtful; they felt God
only to endeavour to forget Him. Therefore He visited them the second
time. They did not feel the Lord shaking their land, so He sent their
enemies to steal it from them: _the Syrians before and the Philistines
behind; and they devour Israel with open mouth_. What that had been for
appalling suddenness this was for lingering and harassing--guerilla
warfare, armed raids, the land eaten away bit by bit. _Yet the people do
not return unto Him that smote them, neither seek they the LORD of
hosts._
[5] Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the
future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the
chapter.
[6] It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that this
phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described in v. 25.
3. WAR AND DEFEAT (ix. 13-17).--The next consequent calamity passed from
the land to the people themselves. A great battle is described, in which
the nation is dismembered in one day. War and its horrors are told, and
the apparent want of Divine pity and discrimination which they imply is
explained. Israel has been led into these disasters by the folly of
their leaders, whom Isaiah therefore singles out for blame. _For they
that lead these people cause them to err, and they that are led of them
are destroyed._ But the real horror of war is that it falls not upon
its authors, that its victims are not statesmen, but the beauty of a
country's youth, the helplessness of the widow and orphan. Some question
seems to have been stirred by this in Isaiah's heart. He asks, Why does
the Lord not rejoice in the young men of His people? Why has He no pity
for widow and orphan, that He thus sacrifices them to the sin of the
rulers? It is because the whole nation shares the ruler's guilt; _every
one is an hypocrite and an evil-doer, and every mouth speaketh folly_.
As ruler so people, is a truth Isaiah frequently asserts, but never with
such grimness as here. War brings out, as nothing else does, the
solidarity of a people in guilt.
4. INTERNAL ANARCHY (ix. 18-21).--Even yet the people did not repent;
their calamities only drove them to further wickedness. The prophet's
eyes are opened to the awful fact that God's wrath is but the blast that
fans men's hot sins to flame. This is one of those two or three awful
scenes in history, in the conflagration of which we cannot tell what is
human sin and what Divine judgement. There is a panic wickedness, sin
spreading like mania, as if men were possessed by supernatural powers.
The physical metaphors of the prophet are evident: a forest or prairie
fire, and the consequent famine, whose fevered victims feed upon
themselves. And no less evident are the political facts which the
prophet employs these metaphors to describe. It is the anarchy which has
beset more than one corrupt and unfortunate people, when their
misleaders have been overthrown: the anarchy in which each faction seeks
to slaughter out the rest. Jealousy and distrust awake the lust for
blood, rage seizes the people as fire the forest, _and no man spareth
his brother_. We have had modern instances of all this; these scenes
form a true description of some days of the French Revolution, and are
even a truer description of the civil war that broke out in Paris after
her late siege.
"If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
'T will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep."[7]
[7] _King Lear_, act iv., sc. 2.
5. THE THREAT OF CAPTIVITY (x. 1-4).--Turning now from the past, and
from the fate of Samaria, with which it would appear he has been more
particularly engaged, the prophet addresses his own countrymen in Judah,
and paints the future for them. It is not a future in which there is any
hope. The day of their visitation also will surely come, and the prophet
sees it close in the darkest night of which a Jewish heart could
think--the night of captivity. Where, he asks his unjust
countrymen--where _will ye then flee for help? and where will you leave
your glory_? Cringing among the captives, lying dead beneath heaps of
dead--that is to be your fate, who will have turned so often and then so
finally from God. When exactly the prophet thus warned his countrymen of
captivity we do not know, but the warning, though so real, produced
neither penitence in men nor pity in God. _For all this His anger is not
turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._
6. THE ASSYRIAN INVASION (v. 26-30).--The prophet is, therefore, free to
explain that cloud which has appeared far away on the northern horizon.
God's hand of judgement is still uplifted over Judah, and it is that
hand which summons the cloud. The Assyrians are coming in answer to
God's signal, and they are coming as a flood, to leave nothing but ruin
and distress behind them. No description by Isaiah is more majestic than
this one, in which Jehovah, who has exhausted every nearer means of
converting His people, lifts His undrooping arm with a _flag to the
nations that are far off, and hisses_ or whistles _for them from the end
of the earth_. _And, behold, they come with speed, swiftly: there is no
weary one nor straggler among them; none slumbers nor sleeps; nor loosed
is the girdle of his loins, nor broken the latchet of his shoes; whose
arrows are sharpened, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs are
like the flint, and their wheels like the whirlwind; a roar have they
like the lion's, and they roar like young lions; yea, they growl and
grasp the prey, and carry it off, and there is none to deliver. And they
growl upon him that day like the growling of the sea; and if one looks
to the land, behold, dark and distress, and the light is darkened in the
cloudy heaven._
Thus Isaiah leaves Judah to await her doom. But the tones of his weird
refrain awaken in our hearts some thoughts which will not let his
message go from us just yet.
It will ever be a question, whether men abuse more their sorrows or
their joys; but no earnest soul can doubt, which of these abuses is the
more fatal. To sin in the one case is to yield to a temptation; to sin
in the other is to resist a Divine grace. Sorrow is God's last message
to man; it is God speaking in emphasis. He who abuses it shows that he
can shut his ears when God speaks loudest. Therefore heartlessness or
impenitence after sorrow is more dangerous than intemperance in joy; its
results are always more tragic. Now Isaiah points out that men's abuse
of sorrow is twofold. Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, and they abuse
sorrow by defying it.
Men abuse sorrow by mistaking it, when they see in it nothing but a
penal or expiatory force. To many men sorrow is what his devotions were
to Louis XI., which having religiously performed, he felt the more brave
to sin. So with the Samaritans, who said in the stoutness of their
hearts, _The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones;
the sycomores are cut down, but we will change them into cedars._ To
speak in this way is happy, but heathenish. It is to call sorrow "bad
luck;" it is to hear no voice of God in it, saying, "Be pure; be humble;
lean upon Me." This disposition springs from a vulgar conception of God,
as of a Being of no permanence in character, easily irritated but
relieved by a burst of passion, smartly punishing His people and then
leaving them to themselves. It is a temper which says, "God is angry,
let us wait a little; God is appeased, let us go ahead again." Over
against such vulgar views of a Deity with a temper Isaiah unveils the
awful majesty of God in holy wrath: _For all this His anger is not
turned away, but His hand is stretched out still_. How grim and savage
does it appear to our eyes till we understand the thoughts of the
sinners to whom it was revealed! God cannot dispel the cowardly thought,
that He is anxious only to punish, except by letting His heavy hand
abide till it purify also. The permanence of God's wrath is thus an
ennobling, not a stupefying doctrine.
Men also abuse sorrow by defying it, but the end of this is madness. "It
forms the greater part of the tragedy of _King Lear_, that the aged
monarch, though he has given his throne away, retains his imperiousness
of heart, and continues to exhibit a senseless, if sometimes
picturesque, pride and selfishness in face of misfortune. Even when he
is overthrown he must still command; he fights against the very
elements; he is determined to be at least the master of his own
sufferings and destiny. But for this the necessary powers fail him; his
life thus disordered terminates in madness. It was only by such an
affliction that a character like his could be brought to repentance, ...
to humility, which is the parent of true love, and that love in him
could be purified. Hence the melancholy close of that tragedy."[8] As
Shakespeare has dealt with the king, so Isaiah with the people; he also
shows us sorrow when it is defied bringing forth madness. On so impious
a height man's brain grows dizzy, and he falls into that terrible abyss
which is not, as some imagine, hell, but God's last purgatory.
Shakespeare brings shattered Lear out of it, and Isaiah has a remnant of
the people to save.
[8] Ulrici: _Shakespeare's Dramatic Art_.
CHAPTER IV.
_ISAIAH'S CALL AND CONSECRATION._
ISAIAH vi. (740 B.C.; WRITTEN 735? OR 725?).
It has been already remarked that in chapter vi. we should find no other
truths than those which have been unfolded in chapters ii.-v.: the Lord
exalted in righteousness, the coming of a terrible judgement from Him
upon Judah, and the survival of a bare remnant of the people. But
chapter vi. treats the same subjects with a difference. In chapters
ii.-iv. they gradually appear and grow to clearness in connection with
the circumstances of Judah's history; in chapter v. they are formally
and rhetorically vindicated; in chapter vi. we are led back to the
secret and solemn moments of their first inspiration in the prophet's
own soul. It may be asked why chapter vi. comes last and not first in
this series, and why in an exposition, attempting to deal, as far as
possible, chronologically with Isaiah's prophecies, his call should not
form the subject of the first chapter. The answer is simple, and throws
a flood of light upon the chapter. In all probability chapter vi. was
written after its predecessors, and what Isaiah has put into it is not
only what happened in the earliest moments of his prophetic life, but
that spelt out and emphasized by his experience since. The ideal
character of the narrative, and its date some years after the events
which it relates, are now generally admitted. Of course the narrative is
all fact. No one will believe that he, whose glance penetrated with such
keenness the character of men and movements, looked with dimmer eye into
his own heart. It is the spiritual process which the prophet actually
passed through before the opening of his ministry. But it is that,
developed by subsequent experience, and presented to us in the language
of outward vision. Isaiah had been some years a prophet, long enough to
make clear that prophecy was not to be for him what it had been for his
predecessors in Israel, a series of detached inspirations and occasional
missions, with short responsibilities, but a work for life, a profession
and a career, with all that this means of postponement, failure, and
fluctuation of popular feeling. Success had not come so rapidly as the
prophet in his original enthusiasm had looked for, and his preaching had
effected little upon the people. Therefore he would go back to the
beginning, remind himself of that to which God had really called him,
and vindicate the results of his ministry, at which people scoffed and
his own heart grew sometimes sick. In chapter vi. Isaiah acts as his own
remembrancer. If we keep in mind, that this chapter, describing Isaiah's
call and consecration to the prophetic office, was written by a man who
felt that office to be the burden of a lifetime, and who had to explain
its nature and vindicate its results to his own soul--grown somewhat
uncertain, it may be, of her original inspiration--we shall find light
upon features of the chapter that are otherwise most obscure.
1. THE VISION (vv. 1-4).
Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says, _In the year King
Uzziah died._ There is more than a date given here; there is a great
contrast suggested. Prophecy does not chronicle by time, but by
experiences, and we have here, as it seems, the cardinal experience of a
prophet's life.
All men knew of that glorious reign with the ghastly end--fifty years of
royalty, and then a lazar-house. There had been no king like this one
since Solomon; never, since the son of David brought the Queen of Sheba
to his feet, had the national pride stood so high or the nation's dream
of sovereignty touched such remote borders. The people's admiration
invested Uzziah with all the graces of the ideal monarch. The chronicler
of Judah tells us _that God helped him and made him to prosper, and his
name spread far abroad, and he was marvellously helped till he was
strong_; he with the double name--Azariah, Jehovah-his-Helper; Uzziah,
Jehovah-his-Strength. How this glory fell upon the fancy of the future
prophet, and dyed it deep, we may imagine from those marvellous colours,
with which in later years he painted the king in his beauty. Think of
the boy, the boy that was to be an Isaiah, the boy with the germs of
this great prophecy in his heart--think of him and such a hero as this
to shine upon him, and we may conceive how his whole nature opened out
beneath that sun of royalty and absorbed its light.
Suddenly the glory was eclipsed, and Jerusalem learned that she had seen
her king for the last time: _The Lord smote the king so that he was a
leper unto the day of his death, and dwelt in a several house, and he
was cut off from the house of the Lord._ Uzziah had gone into the
temple, and attempted with his own hands to burn incense. Under a later
dispensation of liberty he would have been applauded as a brave
Protestant, vindicating the right of every worshipper of God to approach
Him without the intervention of a special priesthood. Under the earlier
dispensation of law his act could be regarded only as one of
presumption, the expression of a worldly and irreverent temper, which
ignored the infinite distance between God and man. It was followed, as
sins of wilfulness in religion were always followed under the old
covenant, by swift disaster. Uzziah suffered as Saul, Uzzah, Nadab and
Abihu did. The wrath, with which he burst out on the opposing priests,
brought on, or made evident as it is believed to have done in other
cases, an attack of leprosy. The white spot stood out unmistakeably from
the flushed forehead, and he was thrust from the temple--_yea, himself
also hasted to go out_.
We can imagine how such a judgement, the moral of which must have been
plain to all, affected the most sensitive heart in Jerusalem. Isaiah's
imagination was darkened, but he tells us that the crisis was the
enfranchisement of his faith. _In the year King Uzziah died_--it is as
if a veil had dropped, and the prophet saw beyond what it had hidden,
_the Lord sitting on a throne high and lifted up_. That it is no mere
date Isaiah means, but a spiritual contrast which he is anxious to
impress upon us, is made clear by his emphasis of the rank and not the
name of God. It is _the Lord sitting upon a throne--the Lord_
absolutely, set over against the human prince. The simple antithesis
seems to speak of the passing away of the young man's hero-worship and
the dawn of his faith; and so interpreted, this first verse of chapter
vi. is only a concise summary of that development of religious
experience which we have traced through chapters ii.-iv. Had Isaiah ever
been subject to the religious temper of his time, the careless optimism
of a prosperous and proud people, who entered upon their religious
services without awe, _trampling the courts of the Lord_, and used them
like Uzziah, for their _own honour_, who felt religion to be an easy
thing, and dismissed from it all thoughts of judgement and feelings of
penitence--if ever Isaiah had been subject to that temper, then once for
all he was redeemed by this stroke upon Uzziah. And, as we have seen,
there is every reason to believe that Isaiah did at first share the too
easy public religion of his youth. That early vision of his (ii. 2-5),
the establishment of Israel at the head of the nations, to be
immediately attained at his own word (v. 5) and without preliminary
purification, was it not simply a less gross form of the king's own
religious presumption? Uzziah's fatal act was the expression of the
besetting sin of his people, and in that sin Isaiah himself had been a
partaker. _I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a
people of unclean lips._ In the person of their monarch the temper of
the whole Jewish nation had come to judgement. Seeking the ends of
religion by his own way, and ignoring the way God had appointed, Uzziah
at the very moment of his insistence was hurled back and stamped
unclean. The prophet's eyes were opened. The king sank into a leper's
grave, but before Isaiah's vision the Divine majesty arose in all its
loftiness. _I saw the Lord high and lifted up._ We already know what
Isaiah means by these terms. He has used them of God's supremacy in
righteousness above the low moral standards of men, of God's occupation
of a far higher throne than that of the national deity of Judah, of
God's infinite superiority to Israel's vulgar identification of His
purposes with her material prosperity or His honour with the
compromises of her politics, and especially of God's seat as their
Judge over a people, who sought in their religion only satisfaction for
their pride and love of ease.
From this contrast the whole vision expands as follows.
Under the mistaken idea that what Isaiah describes is the temple in
Jerusalem, it has been remarked, that the place of his vision is
wonderful in the case of one who set so little store by ceremonial
worship. This, however, to which our prophet looks is no house built
with hands, but Jehovah's own heavenly _palace_ (ver. 1--not _temple_);
only Isaiah describes it in terms of the Jerusalem temple which was its
symbol. It was natural that the temple should furnish Isaiah not only
with the framework of his vision, but also with the platform from which
he saw it. For it was in the temple that Uzziah's sin was sinned and
God's holiness vindicated upon him. It was in the temple that, when
Isaiah beheld the scrupulous religiousness of the people, the contrast
of that with their evil lives struck him, and he summed it up in the
epigram _wickedness and worship_ (i. 13). It was in the temple, in
short, that the prophet's conscience had been most roused, and just
where the conscience is most roused there is the vision of God to be
expected. Very probably it was while brooding over Uzziah's judgement on
the scene of its occurrence that Isaiah beheld his vision. Yet for all
the vision contained the temple itself was too narrow. The truth which
was to be revealed to Isaiah, the holiness of God, demanded a wider
stage and the breaking down of those partitions, which, while they had
been designed to impress God's presence on the worshipper, had only
succeeded in veiling Him. So while the seer keeps his station on the
threshold of the earthly building, soon to feel it rock beneath his
feet, as heaven's praise bursts like thunder on the earth, and while his
immediate neighbourhood remains the same familiar _house_, all beyond is
glorified. The veil of the temple falls away, and everything behind it.
No ark nor mercy-seat is visible, but a throne and a court--the palace
of God in heaven, as we have it also pictured in the eleventh and
twenty-ninth Psalms. The Royal Presence is everywhere. Isaiah describes
no face, only a Presence and a Session: _the Lord sitting on a throne,
and His skirts filled the palace_.
"No face; only the sight
Of a sweepy garment vast and white
With a hem that I could recognize."[9]
[9] Browning's "Christmas Eve."
_Around_ (not _above_, as in the English version) were ranged the
hovering courtiers, of what shape and appearance we know not, except
that they veiled their faces and their feet before the awful
Holiness,--all wings and voice, perfect readinesses of praise and
service. The prophet heard them chant in antiphon, like the temple
choirs of priests. And the one choir cried out, _Holy, holy, holy is
Jehovah of hosts_; and the other responded, _The whole earth is full of
His glory_.
It is by the familiar name Jehovah of hosts--the proper name of Israel's
national God--that the prophet hears the choirs of heaven address the
Divine Presence. But what they ascribe to the Deity is exactly what
Israel will not ascribe, and the revelation they make of His nature is
the contradiction of Israel's thoughts concerning Him.
What, in the first place, is HOLINESS? We attach this term to a definite
standard of morality or an unusually impressive fulness of character.
To our minds it is associated with very positive forces, as of comfort
and conviction--perhaps because we take our ideas of it from the active
operations of the Holy Ghost. The original force of the term _holiness_,
however, was not positive but negative, and throughout the Old
Testament, whatever modifications its meaning undergoes, it retains a
negative flavour. The Hebrew word for holiness springs from a root which
means _to set apart, make distinct, put at a distance from_. When God is
described as the Holy One in the Old Testament it is generally with the
purpose of withdrawing Him from some presumption of men upon His majesty
or of negativing their unworthy thoughts of Him. The Holy One is the
Incomparable: _To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I should be equal
to him? saith the Holy One_ (xl. 25). He is the Unapproachable: _Who is
able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God?_ (1 Sam. vi. 20). He is the
Utter Contrast of man: _I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst
of thee_ (Hosea xi. 9). He is the Exalted and Sublime: _Thus saith the
high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell
in the high and holy place_ (lvii. 15). Generally speaking, then,
holiness is equivalent to separateness, sublimity--in fact, just to that
loftiness or exaltation which Isaiah has already so often reiterated as
the principal attribute of God. In their thrice-repeated _Holy_ the
seraphs are only telling more emphatically to the prophet's ears what
his eyes have already seen, _the Lord high and lifted up_. Better
expression could not be found for the full idea of Godhead. This little
word _Holy_ radiates heaven's own breadth of meaning. Within its
fundamental idea--distance or difference from man--what spaces are
there not for every attribute of Godhead to flash? If the Holy One be
originally He who is distinct from man and man's thoughts, and who
impresses man from the beginning with the awful sublimity of the
contrast in which He stands to him, how naturally may holiness come to
cover not only that moral purity and intolerance of sin to which we now
more strictly apply the term, but those metaphysical conceptions as
well, which we gather up under the name "supernatural," and so finally,
by lifting the Divine nature away from the change and vanity of this
world, and emphasizing God's independence of all beside Himself, become
the fittest expression we have for Him as the Infinite and
Self-existent. Thus the word _holy_ appeals in turn to each of the three
great faculties of man's nature, by which he can be religiously
exercised--his conscience, his affections, his reason; it covers the
impressions which God makes on man as a sinner, on man as a worshipper,
on man as a thinker. The Holy One is not only the Sinless and
Sin-abhorring, but the Sublime and the Absolute too.
But while we recognize the exhaustiveness of the series of ideas about
the Divine Nature, which develop from the root meaning of holiness, and
to express which the word _holy_ is variously used throughout the
Scriptures, we must not, if we are to appreciate the use of the word on
this occasion, miss the motive of recoil which starts them all. If we
would hear what Isaiah heard in the seraphs' song, we must distinguish
in the three-fold ascription of holiness the intensity of recoil from
the confused religious views and low moral temper of the prophet's
generation. It is no scholastic definition of Deity which the seraphim
are giving. Not for a moment is it to be supposed that to that age,
whose representative is listening to them, they are attempting to convey
an idea of the Trinity. Their thrice-uttered _Holy_ is not theological
accuracy, but religious emphasis. This angelic revelation of the
holiness of God was intended for a generation, some of whom were
idol-worshippers, confounding the Godhead with the work of their own
hands or with natural objects, and none of whom were free from a
confusion in principle of the Divine with the human and worldly, for
which now sheer mental slovenliness, now a dull moral sense, and now
positive pride was to blame. To worshippers who _trampled_ the courts of
the Lord with the careless feet, and looked up the temple with the
unabashed faces, of routine, the cry of the seraphs, as they veiled
their faces and their feet, travailed to restore that shuddering sense
of the sublimity of the Divine Presence, which in the impressible youth
of the race first impelled man, bowing low beneath the awful heavens, to
name God by the name of the Holy. To men, again, careful of the legal
forms of worship, but lawless and careless in their lives, the song of
the seraphs revealed not the hard truth, against which they had already
rubbed conscience trite, that God's law was inexorable, but the fiery
fact that His whole nature burned with wrath towards sin. To men, once
more, proud of their prestige and material prosperity, and presuming in
their pride to take their own way with God, and to employ like Uzziah
the exercises of religion for their own honour, this vision presented
the real sovereignty of God: the Lord Himself seated on a throne
_there_--just where they felt only a theatre for the display of their
pride, or machinery for the attainment of their private ends. Thus did
the three-fold cry of the angels meet the three-fold sinfulness of that
generation of men.
But the first line of the seraph's song serves more than a temporary
end. The Trisagion rings, and has need to ring, for ever down the
Church. Everywhere and at all times these are the three besetting sins
of religious people--callousness in worship, carelessness in life, and
the temper which employs the forms of religion simply for
self-indulgence or self-aggrandisement. These sins are induced by the
same habit of contentment with mere form; they can be corrected only by
the vision of the Personal Presence who is behind all form. Our
organization, ritual, law and sacrament--we must be able to see them
fall away, as Isaiah saw the sanctuary itself disappear, before God
Himself, if we are to remain heartily moral and fervently religious. The
Church of God has to learn that no mere multiplication of forms, nor a
more æsthetic arrangement of them, will redeem her worshippers from
callousness. Callousness is but the shell which the feelings develop in
self-defence when left by the sluggish and impenetrative soul to beat
upon the hard outsides of form. And nothing will fuse this shell of
callousness but that ardent flame, which is kindled at the touching of
the Divine and human spirits, when forms have fallen away and the soul
beholds with open face the Eternal Himself. As with worship, so with
morality. Holiness is secured not by ceremonial, but by a reverence for
a holy Being. We shall rub our consciences trite against moral maxims or
religious rites. It is the effluence of a Presence, which alone can
create in us, and keep in us, a clean heart. And if any object that we
thus make light of ritual and religious law, of Church and sacrament,
the reply is obvious. Ritual and sacrament are to the living God but as
the wick of a candle to the light thereof. They are given to reveal Him,
and the process is not perfect unless they themselves perish from the
thoughts to which they convey Him. If God is not felt to be present, as
Isaiah felt Him to be, to the exclusion of all forms, then these will be
certain to be employed, as Uzziah employed them, for the sake of the
only other spiritual being of whom the worshipper is conscious--himself.
Unless we are able to forget our ritual in spiritual communion with the
very God, and to become unconscious of our organization in devout
consciousness of our personal relation to Him, then ritual will be only
a means of sensuous indulgence, organization only a machinery for
selfish or sectarian ends. The vision of God--this is the one thing
needful for worship and for conduct.
But while the one verse of the antiphon reiterates what Jehovah of hosts
is in Himself, the other describes what He is in revelation. _The whole
earth is full of His glory._ Glory is the correlative of holiness. Glory
is that in which holiness comes to expression. Glory is the expression
of holiness, as beauty is the expression of health. If holiness be as
deep as we have seen, so varied then will glory be. There is nothing in
the earth but it is the glory of God. _The fulness of the whole earth is
His glory_, is the proper grammatical rendering of the song. For Jehovah
of hosts is not the God only of Israel, but the Maker of heaven and
earth, and not the victory of Israel alone, but the wealth and the
beauty of all the world is His glory. So universal an ascription of
glory is the proper parallel to that of absolute Godhead, which is
implied in holiness.
II. THE CALL (vv. 4-8).
Thus, then, Isaiah, standing on earth, on the place of a great sin, with
the conscience of his people's evil in his heart, and himself not
without the feeling of guilt, looked into heaven, and beholding the
glory of God, heard also with what pure praise and readiness of service
the heavenly hosts surround His throne. No wonder the prophet felt the
polluted threshold rock beneath him, or that as where fire and water
mingle there should be the rising of a great smoke. For the smoke
described is not, as some have imagined, that of acceptable incense,
thick billows swelling through the temple to express the completion and
satisfaction of the seraphs' worship; but it is the mist which ever
arises where holiness and sin touch each other. It has been described
both as the obscurity that envelops a weak mind in presence of a truth
too great for it, and the darkness that falls upon a diseased eye when
exposed to the mid-day sun. These are only analogies, and may mislead
us. What Isaiah actually felt was the dim-eyed shame, the distraction,
the embarrassment, the blinding shock of a personal encounter with One
whom he was utterly unfit to meet. For this was a personal encounter. We
have spelt out the revelation sentence by sentence in gradual argument;
but Isaiah did not reach it through argument or brooding. It was not to
the prophet what it is to his expositors, a pregnant thought, that his
intellect might gradually unfold, but a Personal Presence, which
apprehended and overwhelmed him. God and he were there face to face.
_Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, because a man unclean of lips
am I, and in the midst of a people unclean of lips do I dwell; for the
King, Jehovah of hosts, mine eyes have beheld._
The form of the prophet's confession, _uncleanness of lips_, will not
surprise us as far as he makes it for himself. As with the disease of
the body, so with the sin of the soul; each often gathers to one point
of pain. Every man, though wholly sinful by nature, has his own
particular consciousness of guilt. Isaiah being a prophet felt his
mortal weakness most upon his lips. The inclusion of the people,
however, along with himself under this form of guilt, suggests a wider
interpretation of it. The lips are, as it were, the blossom of a man.
_Grace is poured upon thy lips, therefore God hath blessed thee for
ever. If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, able to
bridle the whole body also._ It is in the blossom of a plant that the
plant's defects become conspicuous; it is when all a man's faculties
combine for the complex and delicate office of expression that any fault
which is in him will come to the surface. Isaiah had been listening to
the perfect praise of sinless beings, and it brought into startling
relief the defects of his own people's worship. Unclean of lips these
were indeed when brought against that heavenly choir. Their social and
political sin--sin of heart and home and market--came to a head in their
worship, and what should have been the blossom of their life fell to the
ground like a rotten leaf beneath the stainless beauty of the seraphs'
praise.
While the prophet thus passionately gathered his guilt upon his lips, a
sacrament was preparing on which God concentrated His mercy to meet it.
Sacrament and lips, applied mercy and presented sin, now come together.
_Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, and in his hand a glowing
stone--with tongs had he taken it off the altar--and he touched my mouth
and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and so thy iniquity passeth
away and thy sin is atoned for._
The idea of this function is very evident, and a scholar who has said
that it "would perhaps be quite intelligible to the contemporaries of
the prophet, but is undoubtedly obscure to us," appears to have said
just the reverse of what is right; for so simple a process of atonement
leaves out the most characteristic details of the Jewish ritual of
sacrifice, while it anticipates in an unmistakeable manner the essence
of the Christian sacrament. In a scene of expiation laid under the old
covenant, we are struck by the absence of oblation or sacrificial act on
the part of the sinner himself. There is here no victim slain, no blood
sprinkled; an altar is only parenthetically suggested, and even then in
its simplest form, of a hearth on which the Divine fire is continually
burning. The _glowing stone_, not _live coal_ as in the English version,
was no part of the temple furniture, but the ordinary means of conveying
heat or applying fire in the various purposes of household life. There
was, it is true, a carrying of fire in some of the temple services, as,
for example, on the great Day of Atonement, but then it was effected by
a small grate filled with living embers. In the household, on the other
hand, when cakes had to be baked, or milk boiled, or water warmed, or in
fifty similar applications of fire, a glowing stone taken from off the
hearth was the invariable instrument. It is this swift and simple
domestic process which Isaiah now sees substituted for the slow and
intricate ceremonial of the temple--a seraph with a glowing stone in his
hand, _with tongs had he taken it off the altar_. And yet the prophet
feels this only as a more direct expression of the very same idea, with
which the elaborate ritual was inspired--for which the victim was
slain, and the flesh consumed in fire, and the blood sprinkled. Isaiah
desires nothing else, and receives no more, than the ceremonial law was
intended to assure to the sinner--pardon of his sin and reconciliation
to God. But our prophet will have conviction of these immediately, and
with a force which the ordinary ritual is incapable of expressing. The
feelings of this Jew are too intense and spiritual to be satisfied with
the slow pageant of the earthly temple, whose performances to a man in
his horror could only have appeared so indifferent and far away from
himself as not to be really his own nor to effect what he passionately
desired. Instead therefore of laying his guilt in the shape of some
victim on the altar, Isaiah, with a keener sense of its inseparableness
from himself, presents it to God upon his own lips. Instead of being
satisfied with beholding the fire of God consume it on another body than
his own, at a distance from himself, he feels that fire visit the very
threshold of his nature, where he has gathered the guilt, and consume it
there. The whole secret of this startling nonconformity to the law, on
the very floor of the temple, is that for a man who has penetrated to
the presence of God the legal forms are left far behind, and he stands
face to face with the truth by which they are inspired. In that Divine
Presence Isaiah is his own altar; he acts his guilt in his own person,
and so he feels the expiatory fire come to his very self directly from
the heavenly hearth. It is a replica of the fifty-first Psalm: _For Thou
delightest not in sacrifice, else would I give it; Thou hast no pleasure
in burnt offering._ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. This is
my sacrifice, my sense of guilt gathered here upon my lips: my _broken
and contrite heart_, who feel myself undone before Thee, _Lord, Thou
wilt not despise_.
It has always been remarked as one of the most powerful proofs of the
originality and Divine force of Christianity, that from man's worship of
God, and especially from those parts in which the forgiveness of sin is
sought and assured, it did away with the necessity of a physical rite of
sacrifice; that it broke the universal and immemorial habit by which man
presented to God a material offering for the guilt of his soul. By
remembering this fact we may measure the religious significance of the
scene we now contemplate. Nearly eight centuries before there was
accomplished upon Calvary that Divine Sacrifice for sin, which abrogated
a rite of expiation, hitherto universally adopted by the conscience of
humanity, we find a Jew, in the dispensation where such a rite was most
religiously enforced, trembling under the conviction of sin, and upon a
floor crowded with suggestions of physical sacrifice; yet the only
sacrifice he offers is the purely spiritual one of confession. It is
most notable. Look at it from a human point of view, and we can estimate
Isaiah's immense spiritual originality; look at it from a Divine, and we
cannot help perceiving a distinct foreshadow of what was to take place
by the blood of Jesus under the new covenant. To this man, as to some
others of his dispensation, whose experience our Christian sympathy
recognizes so readily in the Psalms, there was granted aforetime
boldness to enter into the holiest. For this is the explanation of
Isaiah's marvellous disregard of the temple ritual. It is all behind
him. This man has passed within the veil. Forms are all behind him, and
he is face to face with God. But between two beings in that position,
intercourse by the far off and uncertain signals of sacrifice is
inconceivable. It can only take place by the simple unfolding of the
heart. It must be rational, intelligent and by speech. When man is at
such close quarters with God what sacrifice is possible but the
sacrifice of the lips? Form for the Divine reply there must be some, for
even Christianity has its sacraments, but like them this sacrament is of
the very simplest form, and like them it is accompanied by the
explanatory word. As Christ under the new covenant took bread and wine,
and made the homely action of feeding upon them the sign and seal to His
disciples of the forgiveness of their sins, so His angel under the old
and sterner covenant took the more severe, but as simple and domestic
form of fire to express the same to His prophet. And we do well to
emphasize that the experimental value of this sacrament of fire is
bestowed by the word attached to it. It is not a dumb sacrament, with a
magical efficacy. But the prophet's mind is persuaded and his conscience
set at peace by the intelligible words of the minister of the sacrament.
Isaiah's sin being taken away, he is able to discern the voice of God
Himself. It is in the most beautiful accordance with what has already
happened that he hears this not as command, but request, and answers not
of compulsion, but of freedom. _And I heard the voice of the Lord
saying, Whom shall I send? and who will go for us? And I said, Here am
I; send me._ What spiritual understanding alike of the will of God and
the responsibility of man, what evangelic liberty and boldness, are
here! Here we touch the spring of that high flight Isaiah takes both in
prophecy and in active service for the State. Here we have the secret of
the filial freedom, the life-long sense of responsibility, the regal
power of initiative, the sustained and unfaltering career, which
distinguish Isaiah among the ministers of the old covenant, and stamp
him prophet by the heart and for the life, as many of them are only by
the office and for the occasion. Other prophets are the servants of the
God of heaven; Isaiah stands next the Son Himself. On others the hand of
the Lord is laid in irresistible compulsion; the greatest of them are
often ignorant, by turns headstrong and craven, deserving correction,
and generally in need of supplementary calls and inspirations. But of
such scourges and such doles Isaiah's royal career is absolutely without
a trace. His course, begun in freedom, is pursued without hesitation or
anxiety; begun in utter self-sacrifice, it knows henceforth no moment of
grudging or disobedience. _Esaias is very bold_, because he is so free
and so fully devoted. In the presence of mind with which he meets each
sudden change of politics during that bewildering half-century of
Judah's history, we seem to hear his calm voice repeating its first,
_Here am I_. Presence of mind he always had. The kaleidoscope shifts: it
is now Egyptian intrigue, now Assyrian force; now a false king requiring
threat of displacement by God's own hero, now a true king, but helpless
and in need of consolation; now a rebellious people to be condemned, and
now an oppressed and penitent one to be encouraged:--different dangers,
with different sorts of salvation possible, obliging the prophet to
promise different futures, and to say things inconsistent with what he
had already said. Yet Isaiah never hesitates; he can always say, _Here
am I_. We hear that voice again in the spontaneousness and versatility
of his style. Isaiah is one of the great kings of literature, with every
variety of style under his sway, passing with perfect readiness, as
subject or occasion calls, from one to another of the tones of a
superbly endowed nature. Everywhere this man impresses us with his
personality, with the wealth of his nature and the perfection of his
control of it. But the personality is consecrated. The _Here am I_ is
followed by the _send me_. And its health, harmony and boldness, are
derived, Isaiah being his own witness, from this early sense of pardon
and purification at the Divine hands. Isaiah is indeed a king and a
priest unto God--a king with all his powers at his own command, a priest
with them all consecrated to the service of Heaven.
One cannot pass away from these verses without observing the plain
answer which they give to the question, What is a call to the ministry
of God? In these days of dust and distraction, full of party cries, with
so many side issues of doctrine and duty presenting themselves, and the
solid attractions of so many other services insensibly leading men to
look for the same sort of attractiveness in the ministry, it may prove a
relief to some to ponder the simple elements of Isaiah's call to be a
professional and life-long prophet. Isaiah got no "call" in our
conventional sense of the word, no compulsion that he must go, no
articulate voice describing him as the sort of man needed for the work,
nor any of those similar "calls" which sluggish and craven spirits so
often desire to relieve them of the responsibility or the strenuous
effort needed in deciding for a profession which their conscience will
not permit them to refuse. Isaiah got no such call. After passing
through the fundamental religious experiences of forgiveness and
cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable premises of life
with God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons was addressed
to him, no compulsion was laid on him; but he heard the voice of God
asking generally for messengers, and he on his own responsibility
answered it for himself in particular. He heard from the Divine lips of
the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately full of the mind
that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart to give himself to
it. So great an example cannot be too closely studied by candidates for
the ministry in our own day. Sacrifice is not the half-sleepy,
half-reluctant submission to the force of circumstance or opinion, in
which shape it is so often travestied among us, but the resolute
self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable soul.
There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion into
the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material bias
by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for something of
a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also. There are
men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the opinion of the
circles they belong to, and there are men who adopt the profession
simply because it is on the line of least resistance. From which false
beginnings rise the spent force, the premature stoppages, the stagnancy,
the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals of the
professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in our
day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do,
become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving
carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their
own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most
patent and disgraceful. God will have no drift-wood for His sacrifices,
no drift-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the beginning of
His service, and a sense of our own freedom and our own responsibility
is an indispensable element in the act of self-consecration. _We_--not
God--have to make the decision. We are not to be dead, but living,
sacrifices, and everything which renders us less than fully alive both
mars at the time the sincerity of our surrender and reacts for evil upon
the whole of our subsequent ministry.
III. THE COMMISSION (vv. 9-13).
A heart so resolutely devoted as we have seen Isaiah's to be was surely
prepared against any degree of discouragement, but probably never did
man receive so awful a commission as he describes himself to have done.
Not that we are to suppose that this fell upon Isaiah all at once, in
the suddenness and distinctness with which he here records it. Our sense
of its awfulness will only be increased when we realize that Isaiah
became aware of it, not in the shock of a single discovery, sufficiently
great to have carried its own anæsthetic along with it, but through a
prolonged process of disillusion, and at the pain of those repeated
disappointments, which are all the more painful that none singly is
great enough to stupefy. It is just at this point of our chapter, that
we feel most the need of supposing it to have been written some years
after the consecration of Isaiah, when his experience had grown long
enough to articulate the dim forebodings of that solemn moment. _Go and
say to this people, Hearing, hear ye, but understand not; seeing, see
ye, but know not. Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears make
heavy, and its eyes smear, lest it see with its eyes, and hear with its
ears, and its heart understand, and it turn again and be healed._ No
prophet, we may be sure, would be asked by God to go and tell his
audiences that in so many words, at the beginning of his career. It is
only by experience that a man understands that kind of a commission,[10]
and for the required experience Isaiah had not long to wait after
entering on his ministry. Ahaz himself, in whose death-year it is
supposed by many that Isaiah wrote this account of his consecration--the
conduct of Ahaz himself was sufficient to have brought out the
convictions of the prophet's heart in this startling form, in which he
has stated his commission. By the word of the Lord and an offer of a
sign from Him, Isaiah did make fat that monarch's heart and smear his
eyes. And perverse as the rulers of Judah were in the examples and
policies they set, the people were as blindly bent on following them to
destruction. _Every one_, said Isaiah, when he must have been for some
time a prophet--_every one is a hypocrite and an evildoer, and every
mouth speaketh folly_.
[10] Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been
prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that his
commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy of the
people.
But if that clear, bitter way of putting the matter can have come to
Isaiah only with the experience of some years, why does he place it upon
the lips of God, as they give him his commission? Because Isaiah is
stating not merely his own singular experience, but a truth always true
of the preaching of the word of God, and of which no prophet at the time
of his consecration to that ministry can be without at least a
foreboding. We have not exhausted the meaning of this awful commission
when we say that it is only a forcible anticipation of the prophet's
actual experience. There is more here than one man's experience. Over
and over again are these words quoted in the New Testament, till we
learn to find them true always and everywhere that the Word of God is
preached to men,--the description of what would seem to be its necessary
effect upon many souls. Both Jesus and Paul use Isaiah's commission of
themselves. They do so like Isaiah at an advanced stage in their
ministry, when the shock of misunderstanding and rejection has been
repeatedly felt, but then not solely as an apt description of their own
experience. They quote God's words to Isaiah as a prophecy fulfilled in
their own case--that is to say, as the statement of a great principle or
truth of which their own ministry is only another instance. Their own
disappointments have roused them to the fact, that this is always an
effect of the word of God upon numbers of men--to deaden their spiritual
faculties. While Matthew and the book of Acts adopt the milder Greek
version of Isaiah's commission, John gives a rendering that is even
stronger than the original. _He hath blinded_, he says of God Himself,
_their eyes and hardened their hearts, lest they should see with their
eyes and perceive with their hearts_. In Mark's narrative Christ says
that He speaks to them that are outside in parables, _for the purpose
that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear,
and not understand, lest haply they should turn again and it should be
forgiven them_. We may suspect, in an utterance so strange to the lips
of the Lord of salvation, merely the irony of His baffled love. But it
is rather the statement of what He believed to be the necessary effect
of a ministry like His own. It marks the direction, not of His desire,
but of natural sequence.
With these instances we can go back to Isaiah and understand why he
should have described the bitter fruits of experience as an imperative
laid upon him by God. _Make fat the heart of this people, and its ears
make heavy, and its eyes do thou smear._ It is the fashion of the
prophet's grammar, when it would state a principle or necessary effect,
to put it in the form of a command. What God expresses to Isaiah so
imperatively as almost to take our breath away; what Christ uttered with
such abruptness that we ask, Does He speak in irony? what Paul laid down
as the conviction of a long and patient ministry, is the great truth
that the Word of God has not only a saving power, but that even in its
gentlest pleadings and its purest Gospel, even by the mouth of Him who
came, not to condemn, but to save the world, it has a power that is
judicial and condemnatory.
It is frequently remarked by us as perhaps the most deplorable fact of
our experience, that there exists in human nature an accursed facility
for turning God's gifts to precisely the opposite ends from those for
which He gave them. So common is man's misunderstanding of the plainest
signs, and so frequent his abuse of the most evident favours of Heaven,
that a spectator of the drama of human history might imagine its Author
to have been a Cynic or Comedian, portraying for His own amusement the
loss of the erring at the very moment of what might have been their
recovery, the frustration of love at the point of its greatest warmth
and expectancy. Let him look closer, however, and he will perceive, not
a comedy, but a tragedy, for neither chance nor cruel sport is here at
work, but free will and the laws of habit, with retribution and penalty.
These actors are not puppets in the hand of a Power that moves them at
will; each of them plays his own part, and the abuse and contradiction,
of which he is guilty, are but the prerogative of his freedom. They are
free beings who thus reject the gift of Divine assistance, and so
piteously misunderstand Divine truth. Look closer still, and you will
see that the way they talk, the impression they accept of God's
goodness, the effect of His judgements upon them, is determined not at
the moment of their choice, and not by a single act of their will, but
by the whole tenor of their previous life. In the sudden flash of some
gift or opportunity, men reveal the stuff of which they are made, the
disposition they have bred in themselves. Opportunity in human life is
as often judgement as it is salvation. When we perceive these things, we
understand that life is not a comedy, where chance governs or
incongruous situations are invented by an Almighty Satirist for his own
sport, but a tragedy, with all tragedy's pathetic elements of royal
wills contending in freedom with each other, of men's wills clashing
with God's: men the makers of their own destinies, and Nemesis not
directing, but following their actions. We go back to the very
fundamentals of our nature on this dread question. To understand what
has been called "a great law in human degeneracy," that "the evil heart
can assimilate good to itself and convert it to its nature," we must
understand what free will means, and take into account the terrible
influence of habit.
Now there is no more conspicuous instance of this law, than that which
is afforded by the preaching of the Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ
reminds us, does not fall on virgin soil; it falls on soil already
holding other seed. When a preacher stands up with the Word of God in a
great congregation, vast as Scripture warrants us for believing his
power to be, his is not the only power that is operative. Each man
present has a life behind that hour and place, lying away in the
darkness, silent and dead as far as the congregation are concerned, but
in his own heart as vivid and loud as the voice of the preacher, though
he be preaching never so forcibly. The prophet is not the only power in
the delivery of God's Word, nor is the Holy Spirit the only power. That
would make all preaching of the Word a mere display. But the Bible
represents it as a strife. And now it is said of men themselves that
they harden their hearts against the Word, and now--because such
hardening is the result of previous sinning, and has therefore a
judicial character--that God hardens their hearts. _Simon, Simon_, said
Christ to a face that spread out to His own all the ardour of worship,
_Satan is desiring to have you, but I have prayed that your faith fail
not_. God sends His Word into our hearts; the Mediator stands by, and
prays that it make us His own. But there are other factors in the
operation, and the result depends on our own will; it depends on our own
will, and it is dreadfully determined by our habits.
Now this is one of the first facts to which a young reformer or prophet
awakes. Such an awakening is a necessary element in his education and
apprenticeship. He has seen the Lord high and lifted up. His lips have
been touched by the coal from off the altar. His first feeling is that
nothing can withstand that power, nothing gainsay this inspiration. Is
he a Nehemiah, and the hand of the Lord has been mighty upon him? Then
he feels that he has but to tell his fellows of it to make them as
enthusiastic in the Lord's work as himself. Is he a Mazzini, aflame from
his boyhood with aspirations for his country, consecrated from his birth
to the cause of duty? Then he leaps with joy upon his mission; he has
but to show himself, to speak, to lead the way, and his country is free.
Is he--to descend to a lower degree of prophecy--a Fourier, sensitive
more than most to how anarchic society is, and righteously eager to
settle it upon stable foundations? Then he draws his plans for
reconstruction, he projects his phalanges and phalansteres, and believes
that he has solved the social problem. Is he--to come back to the
heights--an Isaiah, with the Word of God in him like fire? Then he sees
his vision of the perfect state; he thinks to lift his people to it by a
word. _O house of Jacob_, he says, _come ye, and let us walk in the
light of the Lord_!
For all of whom the next necessary stage of experience is one of
disappointment, with the hard commission, _Make the heart of this people
fat_. They must learn that, if God has caught themselves young, and when
it was possible to make them entirely His own, the human race to whom He
sends them is old, too old for them to effect much upon the mass of it
beyond the hardening and perpetuation of evil. Fourier finds that to
produce his perfect State he would need to re-create mankind, to cut
down the tree to the very roots, and begin again. After the first rush
of patriotic fervour, which carried so many of his countrymen with him,
Mazzini discovers himself in "a moral desert," confesses that the
struggle to liberate his fatherland, which has only quickened him to
further devotion in so great a cause, has been productive of scepticism
in his followers, and has left them withered and hardened of heart,
whom it had found so capable of heroic impulses. He tells us how they
upbraided and scorned him, left him in exile, and returned to their
homes, from which they had set out with vows to die for their country,
doubting now whether there was anything at all worth living or dying for
outside themselves. Mazzini's description of the first passage of his
career is invaluable for the light which it throws upon this commission
of Isaiah. History does not contain a more dramatic representation of
the entirely opposite effects of the same Divine movement upon different
natures. While the first efforts for the liberty of Italy materialized
the greater number of his countrymen, whom Mazzini had persuaded to
embark upon it, the failure and their consequent defection only served
to strip this heroic soul of the last rags of selfishness, and
consecrate it more utterly to the will of God and the duty that lay
before it.
A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be
quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must
have passed through.
"It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their
lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up
their soul--like Robespierre--beneath some barren intellectual
formula, but have retained a loving heart, are doomed, once at
least, to battle through. My heart was overflowing with and greedy
of affection, as fresh and eager to unfold to joy as in the days
when sustained by my mother's smile, as full of fervid hope for
others, at least, if not for myself. But during these fatal months
there darkened round me such a hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and
deception as to bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness,
a foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary in a desert
world, wherein no comfort in the struggle was vouchsafed to me. It
was not only the overthrow for an indefinite period of every
Italian hope, ... it was the falling to pieces of that moral
edifice of faith and love from which alone I had derived strength
for the combat; the scepticism I saw arising round me on every
side; the failure of faith in those who had solemnly bound
themselves to pursue unshaken the path we had known at the outset
to be choked with sorrows; the distrust I detected in those most
dear to me, as to the motives and intentions which sustained and
urged me onward in the evidently unequal struggle.... When I felt
that I was indeed alone in the world, I drew back in terror at the
void before me. There, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me.
Perhaps I was wrong, and the world right? Perhaps my idea was
indeed a dream?... One morning I awoke to find my mind tranquil and
my spirit calmed, as one who has passed through a great danger. The
first thought that passed across my spirit was, _Your sufferings
are the temptations of egotism, and arise from a misconception of
life_.... I perceived that although every instinct of my heart
rebelled against that fatal and ignoble definition of life which
makes it to be a _search after happiness_, yet I had not completely
freed myself from the dominating influence exercised by it upon the
age.... I had been unable to realize the true ideal of love--love
without earthly hope.... Life is a mission, duty therefore its
highest law. From the idea of God I descended to faith in a mission
and its logical consequence--duty the supreme rule of life; and
having reached that faith, I swore to myself that nothing in this
world should again make me doubt or forsake it. It was, as Dante
says, passing through martyrdom to peace--'a forced and desperate
peace.' I do not deny, for I fraternized with sorrow, and wrapped
myself in it as in a mantle; but yet it was peace, for I learned to
suffer without rebellion, and to live calmly and in harmony with my
own spirit. I reverently bless God the Father for what consolations
of affection--I can conceive of no other--He has vouchsafed to me
in my later years; and in them I gather strength to struggle with
the occasional return of weariness of existence. But even were
these consolations denied me, I believe I should still be what I
am. Whether the sun shine with the serene splendour of an Italian
noon, or the leaden, corpse-like hue of the northern mist be above
us, I cannot see that it changes our duty. God dwells above the
earthly heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future still
shine within our souls, even though their light consume itself
unreflected as the sepulchral lamp."
Such sentences are the best commentary we can offer on our text. The
cases of the Hebrew and Italian prophets are wonderfully alike. We who
have read Isaiah's fifth chapter know how his heart also was
"overflowing with and greedy of affection," and in the second and third
chapters we have seen "the hurricane of sorrow, disillusion and
deception darken round him." "The falling to pieces of the moral edifice
of faith and love," "scepticism rising on every side," "failure of faith
in those who had solemnly bound themselves," "distrust detected in those
most dear to me"--and all felt by the prophet as the effect of the
sacred movement God had inspired him to begin:--how exact a counterpart
it is to the cumulative process of brutalizing which Isaiah heard God
lay upon him, with the imperative _Make the heart of this people fat!_
In such a morally blind, deaf and dead-hearted world Isaiah's faith was
indeed "to consume itself unreflected like the sepulchral lamp." The
glimpse into his heart given us by Mazzini enables us to realize with
what terror Isaiah faced such a void. _O Lord, how long?_ This, too,
breathes the air of "a forced and desperate peace," the spirit of one
who, having realized life as a mission, has made the much more rare
recognition that the logical consequence is neither the promise of
success nor the assurance of sympathy, but simply the acceptance of
duty, with whatever results and under whatever skies it pleases God to
bring over him.
_Until cities fall into ruin without an inhabitant,
And houses without a man,
And the land be left desolately waste,
And Jehovah have removed man far away,
And great be the desert in the midst of the land;
And still if there be a tenth in it,
Even it shall be again for consuming.
Like the terebinth, and like the oak,
Whose stock when they are felled remaineth in them,
The holy seed shall be its stock._
The meaning of these words is too plain to require exposition, but we
can hardly over-emphasize them. This is to be Isaiah's one text
throughout his career. "Judgement shall pass through; a remnant shall
remain." All the politics of his day, the movement of the world's
forces, the devastation of the holy land, the first captivities of the
holy people, the reiterated defeats and disappointments of the next
fifty years--all shall be clear and tolerable to Isaiah as the
fulfilling of the sentence to which he listened in such "forced and
desperate peace" on the day of his consecration. He has had the worst
branded into him; henceforth no man nor thing may trouble him. He has
seen the worst, and knows there is a beginning beyond. So when the
wickedness of Judah and the violence of Assyria alike seem most
unrestrained--Assyria most bent on destroying Judah, and Judah least
worthy to live--Isaiah will yet cling to this, that a remnant must
remain. All his prophecies will be variations of this text; it is the
key to his apparent paradoxes. He will proclaim the Assyrians to be
God's instrument, yet devote them to destruction. He will hail their
advance on Judah, and yet as exultingly mark its limit, because of the
determination in which he asked the question, _O Lord, how long?_ and
the clearness with which he understood the _until_, that came in answer
to it. Every prediction he makes, every turn he seeks to give to the
practical politics of Judah, are simply due to his grasp of these two
facts--a withering and repeated devastation, in the end a bare survival.
He has, indeed, prophecies which travel farther; occasionally he is
permitted to indulge in visions of a new dispensation. Like Moses, he
climbs his Pisgah, but he is like Moses also in this, that his lifetime
is exhausted with the attainment of the margin of a long period of
judgement and struggle, and then he passes from our sight, and no man
knoweth his sepulchre unto this day. As abruptly as this vision closes
with the announcement of _the remnant_, so abruptly does Isaiah
disappear on the fulfilment of the announcement--some forty years
subsequent to this vision--in the sudden rescue of the holy seed from
the grasp of Sennacherib.
* * * * *
We have now finished the first period of Isaiah's career. Let us
catalogue what are his leading doctrines up to this point. High above a
very sinful people, and beyond all their conceptions of Him, Jehovah,
the national God, rises holy, exalted in righteousness. From such a God
to such a people it can only be judgement and affliction that pass; and
these shall not be averted by the fact that He is the national God, and
they His worshippers. Of this affliction the Assyrians gathering far off
upon the horizon are evidently to be the instruments. The affliction
shall be very sweeping; again and again shall it come; but the Lord will
finally save a remnant of His people. Three elements compose this
preaching--a very keen and practical conscience of sin; an overpowering
vision of God, in whose immediate intimacy the prophet believes himself
to be; and a very sharp perception of the politics of the day.
One question rises. In this part of Isaiah's ministry there is no trace
of that Figure whom we chiefly identify with his preaching, the Messiah.
Let us have patience; it is not time for him; but the following is his
connection with the prophet's present doctrines.
Isaiah's great result at present is the certainty of a remnant. That
remnant will require two things--they will require a rallying-point,
and they will require a leader. Henceforth Isaiah's prophesying will be
bent to one or other of these. The two grand purposes of his word and
work will be, for the sake of the remnant, the inviolateness of Zion,
and the coming of the Messiah. The former he has, indeed, already
intimated (chap. iv.); the latter is now to share with it his hope and
eloquence.
[Illustration: (Map) Isaiah's World]
CHAPTER V.
_THE WORLD IN ISAIAH'S DAY AND ISRAEL'S GOD._
735-730 B.C.
Up to this point we have been acquainted with Isaiah as a prophet of
general principles, preaching to his countrymen the elements of
righteousness and judgement, and tracing the main lines of fate along
which their evil conduct was rapidly forcing them. We are now to observe
him applying these principles to the executive politics of the time, and
following Judah's conduct to the issues he had predicted for it in the
world outside herself. Hitherto he has been concerned with the inner
morals of Jewish society; he is now to engage himself with the effect of
these on the fortunes of the Jewish State. In his seventh chapter Isaiah
begins that career of practical statesmanship, which not only made him
"the greatest political power in Israel since David," but placed him,
far above his importance to his own people, upon a position of influence
over all ages. To this eminence Isaiah was raised, as we shall see, by
two things. First, there was the occasion of his times, for he lived at
a juncture at which the vision of the _World_, as distinguished from the
_Nation_, opened to his people's eyes. Second, he had the faith which
enabled him to realize the government of the World by the One God, whom
he has already beheld exalted and sovereign within the Nation. In the
Nation we have seen Isaiah led to emphasize very absolutely the
righteousness of God; applying this to the whole World, he is now to
speak as the prophet of what we call Providence. He has seen Jehovah
ruling in righteousness in Judah; he is now to take possession of the
nations of the World in Jehovah's name. But we mistake Isaiah if we
think it is any abstract doctrine of providence which he is about to
inculcate. For him God's providence has in the meantime but one end: the
preservation of a remnant of the holy people. Afterwards we shall find
him expecting besides, the conversion of the whole World to faith in
Israel's God.
The World in Isaiah's day was practically Western Asia. History had not
long dawned upon Europe; over Western Asia it was still noon. Draw a
line from the Caspian to the mouth of the Persian Gulf; between that
line and another crossing the Levant to the west of Cyprus, and
continuing along the Libyan border of Egypt, lay the highest forms of
religion and civilisation which our race had by that period achieved.
This was the World on which Isaiah looked out from Jerusalem, the
furthest borders of which he has described in his prophecies, and in the
political history of which he illustrated his great principles. How was
it composed?
There were, first of all, at either end of it, north-east and
south-west, the two great empires of ASSYRIA and EGYPT, in many respects
wonderful counterparts of each other. No one will understand the history
of Palestine, who has not grasped its geographical position relative to
these similar empires. Syria, shut up between the Mediterranean sea and
the Arabian desert, has its outlets north and south into two great
river-plains, each of them ending in a delta. Territories of that kind
exert a double force on the world with which they are connected, now
drawing across their boundaries the hungry races of neighbouring
highlands and deserts, and again sending them forth, compact and
resistless armies. This double action summarises the histories of both
Egypt and Assyria from the earliest times to the period which we are now
treating, and was the cause of the constant circulation, by which, as
the Bible bears witness, the life of Syria was stirred from the Tower of
Babel downwards. Mesopotamia and the Nile valley drew races as beggars
to their rich pasture grounds, only to send them forth in subsequent
centuries as conquerors. The century of Isaiah fell in a period of
forward movement. Assyria and Egypt were afraid to leave each other in
peace; and the wealth of Phoenicia, grown large enough to excite their
cupidity, lay between them. In each of these empires, however, there was
something to hamper this aggressive impulse. Neither Assyria nor Egypt
was a homogeneous State. The valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile were,
each of them the home of two nations. Beside Assyria lay Babylonia, once
Assyria's mistress, and now of all the Assyrian provinces by far the
hardest to hold in subjection, although it lay the nearest to home. In
Isaiah's time, when an Assyrian monarch is unable to come into
Palestine, Babylon is generally the reason; and it is by intriguing with
Babylon that a king of Judah attempts to keep Assyria away from his own
neighbourhood. But Babylon only delayed the Assyrian conquest. In Egypt,
on the other hand, power was more equally balanced between the hardier
people up the Nile and the wealthier people down the Nile--between the
Ethiopians and the Egyptians proper. It was the repeated and undecisive
contests between these two during the whole of Isaiah's day, which kept
Egypt from being an effective force in the politics of Western Asia. In
Isaiah's day no Egyptian army advanced more than a few leagues beyond
its own frontier.
Next in this world of Western Asia come the PHOENICIANS. We may say
that they connected Egypt and Assyria, for although Phoenicia proper
meant only the hundred and fifty miles of coast between Carmel and the
bay of Antioch, the Phoenicians had large colonies on the delta of the
Nile and trading posts upon the Euphrates. They were gathered into
independent but more or less confederate cities, the chief of them Tyre
and Sidon; which, while they attempted the offensive only in trade, were
by their wealth and maritime advantages capable of offering at once a
stronger attraction and a more stubborn resistance to the Assyrian arms,
than any other power of the time. Between Phoenicia proper and the
mouths of the Nile, the coast was held by groups of PHILISTINE cities,
whose nearness to Egypt rather than their own strength was the source of
a frequent audacity against Assyria, and the reason why they appear in
the history of this period oftener than any other State as the object of
Assyrian campaigns.
Behind Phoenicia and the Philistines lay a number of inland
territories: the sister-States of Judah and Northern Israel, with their
cousins Edom, Moab, and Aram or Syria. Of which JUDAH and ISRAEL were
together about the size of Wales; EDOM a mountain range the size and
shape of Cornwall; MOAB, on its north, a broken tableland, about a
Devonshire; and ARAM, or SYRIA, a territory round Damascus, of uncertain
size, but considerable enough to have resisted Assyria for a hundred and
twenty years. Beyond Aram, again, to the north, lay the smaller State of
HAMATH, in the mouth of the pass between the Lebanons, with nothing
from it to the Euphrates. And then, hovering upon the east of these
settled States, were a variety of more or less NOMADIC TRIBES, whose
refuges were the vast deserts of which so large a part of Western Asia
consists.
Here was a world, with some of its constituents wedged pretty firmly by
mutual pressure, but in the main broken and restless--a political
surface that was always changing. The whole was subject to the movements
of the two empires at its extremes. One of them could not move without
sending a thrill through to the borders of the other. The approximate
distances were these:--from Egypt's border to Jerusalem, about one
hundred miles; from Jerusalem to Samaria, forty-five; from Samaria to
Damascus, one hundred and fifteen; from Damascus to Hamath, one hundred
and thirty; and from Hamath to the Euphrates, one hundred; in all from
the border of Egypt to the border of Assyria four hundred and ninety
English statute miles. The main line of war and traffic, coming up from
Egypt, kept the coast to the plain of Esdraelon, which it crossed
towards Damascus, travelling by the north of the sea of Galilee, _the
way of the sea_. Northern Israel was bound to fall an early prey to
armies, whose easiest path thus traversed her richest provinces. Judah,
on the other hand, occupied a position so elevated and apart, that it
was likely to be the last that either Assyria or Egypt would achieve in
their subjugation of the States between them.
Thus, then, Western Asia spread itself out in Isaiah's day. Let us take
one more rapid glance across it. Assyria to the north, powerful and on
the offensive, but hampered by Babylon; Egypt on the south, weakened and
in reserve; all the cities and States between turning their faces
desperately northwards, but each with an ear bent back for the promises
of the laggard southern power, and occasionally supported by its
subsidies; Hamath, their advanced guard at the mouth of the pass between
the Lebanons, looking out towards the Euphrates; Tyre and Sidon
attractive to the Assyrian king, whose policy is ultimately commercial,
by their wealth, both they and the Philistine cities obstructing his
path by the coast to his great rival of Egypt; Israel bulwarked against
Assyria by Hamath and Damascus, but in danger, as soon as they fall, of
seeing her richest provinces overrun; Judah unlikely in the general
restlessness to retain her hold upon Edom, but within her own borders
tolerably secure, neither lying in the Assyrian's path to Egypt, nor
wealthy enough to attract him out of it; safe, therefore, in the
neutrality which Isaiah ceaselessly urges her to preserve, and in danger
of suction into the whirlpool of the approach of the two empires only
through the foolish desire of her rulers to secure an utterly
unnecessary alliance with the one or the other of them.
For a hundred and twenty years before the advent of Isaiah, the annals
of the Assyrian kings record periodical campaigns against the cities of
"the land of the west," but these isolated incursions were followed by
no permanent results. In 745, however, five years before King Uzziah
died, a soldier ascended the throne of Assyria, under the title of
Tiglath-pileser II.,[11] who was determined to achieve the conquest of
the whole world and its organization as his empire. Where his armies
came, it was not simply to chastise or demand tribute, but to annex
countries, carry away their populations and exploit their resources. It
was no longer kings who were threatened; peoples found themselves in
danger of extinction. This terrible purpose of the Assyrian was pursued
with vast means and the utmost ferocity. He has been called the Roman of
the East, and up to a certain degree we may imagine his policy by
remembering all that is familiar to us of its execution by Rome: its
relentlessness, impetus and mysterious action from one centre; the
discipline, the speed, the strange appearance, of his armies. But there
was an Oriental savagery about Assyria, from which Rome was free. The
Assyrian kings moved in the power of their brutish and stormy gods--gods
that were in the shape of bulls and had the wings as of the tempest. The
annals of these kings, in which they describe their campaigns, are full
of talk about trampling down their enemies; about showering tempests of
clubs upon them, and raining a deluge of arrows; about overwhelming
them, and sweeping them off the face of the land, and strewing them like
chaff on the sea; about chariots with scythes, and wheels clogged with
blood; about great baskets stuffed with the salted heads of their foes.
It is a mixture of the Roman and Red Indian.
[11] The Pul of 2 Kings xv. 19 and the Tiglath-pileser of 2 Kings xvi.
are the same.
Picture the effect of the onward movement of such a force upon the
imaginations and policies of those little States that clustered round
Judah and Israel. Settling their own immemorial feuds, they sought
alliance with one another against this common foe. Tribes, that for
centuries had stained their borders with one another's blood, came
together in unions, the only reason for which was that their common fear
had grown stronger than their mutual hate. Now and then a king would be
found unwilling to enter such an alliance or eager to withdraw from it,
in the hope of securing by his exceptional conduct the favour of the
Assyrian, whom he sought further to ingratiate by voluntary tribute. The
shifting attitudes of the petty kings towards Assyria bewilder the
reader of the Assyrian annals. The foes of one year are the tributaries
of the next; the State, that has called for help this campaign, appears
as the rebel of that. In 742, Uzziah of Judah is cursed by
Tiglath-pileser as an arch-enemy; Samaria and Damascus are recorded as
faithful tributaries. Seven years later Ahaz of Judah offers tribute to
the Assyrian king, and Damascus and Samaria are invaded by the Assyrian
armies. What a world it was, and what politics! A world of petty clans,
with no idea of a common humanity, and with no motive for union except
fear; politics without a noble thought or long purpose in them, the
politics of peoples at bay--the last flicker of dying nationalities,--
_stumps of smoking firebrands_, as Isaiah described two of them.
When we turn to the little we know of the religions of these tribes, we
find nothing to arrest their restlessness or broaden their thoughts.
These nations had their religions, and called on their gods, but their
gods were made in their own image, their religion was the reflex of
their life. Each of them employed, rather than worshipped, its deity. No
nation believed in its god except as one among many, with his
sovereignty limited to its own territory, and his ability to help it
conditioned by the power of the other gods, against whose peoples he was
fighting. There was no belief in "Providence," no idea of unity or of
progress in history, no place in these religions for the great
world-force that was advancing upon their peoples.
From this condemnation we cannot except the people of Jehovah. It is
undeniable that the mass of them occupied at this time pretty much the
same low religious level as their neighbours. We have already seen
(chap. i.) their mean estimate of what God required from themselves;
with that corresponded their view of His position towards the world. To
the majority of the Israelites their God was but one out of many, with
His own battles to fight and have fought for Him, a Patron sometimes to
be ashamed of, and by no means a Saviour in whom to place an absolute
trust. When Ahaz is beaten by Syria, he says: _Because the gods of the
kings of Syria helped them, therefore will I sacrifice to them, that
they may help me_ (2 Chron. xxviii. 23). Religion to Ahaz was only
another kind of diplomacy. He was not a fanatic, but a diplomat, who
made his son to pass through the fire to Moloch, and burnt incense in
the high places and on the hills, and under every green tree. He was
more a political than a religious eclectic, who brought back the pattern
of the Damascus altar to Jerusalem. The Temple, in which Isaiah saw the
Lord high and lifted up, became under Ahaz, and by the help of the
priesthood, the shelter of various idols; in every corner of Jerusalem
altars were erected to other gods. This religious hospitality was the
outcome neither of imagination nor of liberal thought; it was prompted
only by political fear. Ahaz has been mistaken in the same way as
Charles I. was--for a bigot, and one who subjected the welfare of his
kingdom to a superstitious regard for religion. But beneath the cloak of
religious scrupulousness and false reverence,[12] there was in Ahaz the
same selfish fear for the safety of his crown and his dynasty, as those
who best knew the English monarch tell us, was the real cause of his
ceaseless intrigue and stupid obstinacy.
[12] Isa. vii. 12.
Now that we have surveyed this world, its politics and its religion, we
can estimate the strength and originality of the Hebrew prophets. Where
others saw the conflicts of nations, aided by deities as doubtfully
matched as themselves, they perceived all things working together by the
will of one supreme God and serving His ends of righteousness. It would
be wrong to say, that before the eighth century the Hebrew conception of
God had been simply that of a national deity, for this would be to
ignore the remarkable emphasis placed by the Hebrews from very early
times upon Jehovah's righteousness. But till the eighth century the
horizon of the Hebrew mind had been the border of their territory; the
historical theatre on which it saw God working was the national life.
Now, however, the Hebrews were drawn into the world; they felt movements
of which their own history was but an eddy; they saw the advance of
forces against which their own armies, though inspired by Jehovah, had
no chance of material success. The perspective was entirely changed;
their native land took to most of them the aspect of a petty and
worthless province, their God the rank of a mere provincial deity; they
refused the waters of Shiloah, that go softly, and rejoiced in the glory
of the king of Assyria, the king of the great River and the hosts that
moved with the strength of its floods. It was at this moment that the
prophets of Israel performed their supreme religious service. While Ahaz
and the mass of the people illustrated the impotence of the popular
religion, by admitting to an equal place in the national temple the gods
of their victorious foes, the prophets boldly took possession of the
whole world in the name of Jehovah of hosts, and exalted Him to the
throne of the supreme Providence. Now they could do this only by
emphasizing and developing the element of righteousness in the old
conception of Him. This attribute of Jehovah took absolute possession of
the prophets; and in the strength of its inspiration they were enabled,
at a time when it would have been the sheerest folly to promise Israel
victory against a foe like Assyria, to asseverate that even that supreme
world-power was in the hand of Jehovah, and that He must be trusted to
lead up all the movements of which the Assyrians were the main force to
the ends He had so plainly revealed to His chosen Israel. Even before
Isaiah's time such principles had been proclaimed by Amos and Hosea, but
it was Isaiah, who both gave to them their loftiest expression, and
applied them with the utmost detail and persistence to the practical
politics of Judah. We have seen him, in the preliminary stages of his
ministry under Uzziah and Jotham, reaching most exalted convictions of
the righteousness of Jehovah, as contrasted with the people's view of
their God's "nationalism." But we are now to follow him boldly applying
this faith--won within the life of Judah, won, as he tells us, by the
personal inspiration of Judah's God--to the problems and movements of
the whole world as they bear upon Israel's fate. The God, who is supreme
in Judah through righteousness, cannot but be supreme everywhere else,
for there is nothing in the world higher than righteousness. Isaiah's
faith in a Divine Providence is a close corollary to his faith in
Jehovah's righteousness; and of one part of that Providence he had
already received conviction--_A remnant shall remain_. Ahaz may crowd
Jerusalem with foreign altars and idols, so as to be able to say: "We
have with us, on our side, Moloch and Chemosh and Rimmon and the gods of
Damascus and Assyria." Isaiah, in the face of this folly, lifts up his
simple gospel: "Immanu-El. We have with us, in our own Jehovah of hosts,
El, the one supreme God, Ruler of heaven and earth."
CHAPTER VI.
_KING AND MESSIAH; PEOPLE AND CHURCH._
ISAIAH vii., viii., ix. 1-8.
735-732 B.C.
This section of the book of Isaiah (vii.-ix. 7) consists of a number of
separate prophecies uttered during a period of at least three years:
735-732 B.C. By 735 Ahaz had ascended the throne; Tiglath-pileser had
been occupied in the far east for two years. Taking advantage of the
weakness of the former and the distance of the latter, Rezin, king of
Damascus, and Pekah, king of Samaria, planned an invasion of Judah. It
was a venture they would not have dared had Uzziah been alive. While
Rezin marched down the east of the Jordan and overturned the Jewish
supremacy in Edom, Pekah threw himself into Judah, defeated the armies
of Ahaz in one great battle, and besieged Jerusalem, with the object of
deposing Ahaz and setting a Syrian, Ben-Tabeel, in his stead.
Simultaneously the Philistines attacked Judah from the south-west. The
motive of the confederates was in all probability anger with Ahaz for
refusing to enter with them into a Pan-Syrian alliance against Assyria.
In his distress Ahaz appealed to Tiglath-pileser, and the Assyrian
swiftly responded. In 734--it must have been less than a year since Ahaz
was attacked--the hosts of the north had overrun Samaria and swept as
far south as the cities of the Philistines. Then, withdrawing his troops
again, Tiglath-pileser left Hoshea as his vassal on Pekah's throne, and
sending the population of Israel east of the Jordan into distant
captivity, completed a two years' siege of Damascus (734-732) by its
capture. At Damascus Ahaz met the conqueror, and having paid him
tribute, took out a further policy of insurance in the altar-pattern,
which he brought back with him to Jerusalem. Such were the three years,
whose rapid changes unfolded themselves in parallel with these
prophecies of Isaiah. The details are not given by the prophet, but we
must keep in touch with them while we listen to him. Especially must we
remember their central point, _the decision of Ahaz to call in the help
of Assyria_, a decision which affected the whole course of politics for
the next thirty years. Some of the oracles of this section were plainly
delivered by Isaiah before that event, and simply seek to inspire Ahaz
with a courage which should feel Assyrian help to be needless; others,
again, imply that Ahaz has already called in the Assyrian: they taunt
him with hankering after foreign strength, and depict the woes which the
Assyrian will bring upon the land; while others (for example, the
passage ix. 1-7) mean that the Assyrian has already come, and that the
Galilean provinces of Israel have been depopulated, and promise a
Deliverer. If we do not keep in mind the decision of Ahaz, we shall not
understand these seemingly contradictory utterances, which it thoroughly
explains. Let us now begin at the beginning of chapter vii. It opens
with a bare statement, by way of title, of the invasion of Judah and the
futile result; and then proceeds to tell us how Isaiah acted from the
first rumour of the confederacy onward.
I. THE KING (chap. vii.).
_And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz, the son of Jotham, the son of
Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin, the king of Syria, and Pekah, the son
of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up to Jerusalem to war against it, but
could not prevail against it._ This is a summary of the whole adventure
and issue of the war, given by way of introduction. The narrative proper
begins in verse 2, with the effect of the first news of the league upon
Ahaz and his people. Their hearts were moved, like the trees of the
forest before the wind. The league was aimed so evidently against the
two things most essential to the national existence and the honour of
Jehovah; the dynasty of David, namely, and the inviolability of
Jerusalem. Judah had frequently before suffered the loss of her
territory; never till now were the throne and city of David in actual
peril. But that, which bent both king and people by its novel terror,
was the test Isaiah expected for the prophecies he had already uttered.
Taking with him, as a summary of them, his boy with the name
Shear-Jashub--_A-remnant-shall-return_--Isaiah faced Ahaz and his court
in the midst of their preparation for the siege. They were
examining--but more in panic than in prudence--the water supply of the
city, when Isaiah delivered to them a message from the Lord, which may
be paraphrased as follows: _Take heed and be quiet_, keep your eyes open
and your heart still; _fear not, neither be faint-hearted, for the
fierce anger of Rezin and Remaliah's son_. They have no power to set you
on fire. They are _but stumps of expiring firebrands_, almost burnt out.
While you wisely look after your water supply, do so in hope. This
purpose of deposing you is vain. _Thus saith the Lord Jehovah: It shall
not stand, neither shall it come to pass._ Of whom are you afraid? Look
those foes of yours in the face. _The head of Syria is Damascus, and
Damascus' head is Rezin_: is he worth fearing? _The head of Ephraim is
Samaria, and Samaria's head is Remaliah's son_: is he worth fearing?
Within a few years they will certainly be destroyed. But whatever
estimate you make of your foes, whatever their future may be, for
yourself have faith in God; for you that is the essential thing. _If ye
will not believe, surely ye shall not be established._[13]
[13] There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in English
by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not _faith_, ye cannot
have _staith_.
This paraphrase seeks to bring out the meaning of a passage confessedly
obscure. It seems as if we had only bits of Isaiah's speech to Ahaz and
must supply the gaps. No one need hesitate, however, to recognize the
conspicuous personal qualities--the combination of political sagacity
with religious fear, of common-sense and courage rooted in faith. In a
word, this is what Isaiah will say to the king, clever in his alliances,
religious and secular, and busy about his material defences: "Take unto
you the shield of faith. You have lost your head among all these things.
Hold it up like a man behind that shield; take a rational view of
affairs. Rate your enemies at their proper value. But for this you must
believe in God. Faith in Him is the essential condition of a calm mind
and a rational appreciation of affairs."
It is, no doubt, difficult for us to realize that the truth which Isaiah
thus enforced on King Ahaz--the government of the world and human
history by one supreme God--was ever a truth of which the race stood in
ignorance. A generation like ours cannot be expected to put its mind in
the attitude of those of Isaiah's contemporaries who believed in the
real existence of many gods with limited sovereignties. To us, who are
full of the instincts of Divine Providence and of the presence in
history of law and progress, it is extremely hard even to admit the
fact--far less fully to realize what it means--that our race had ever to
receive these truths as fresh additions to their stock of intellectual
ideas. Yet, without prejudice to the claims of earlier prophets, this
may be confidently affirmed: that Isaiah where we now meet him stood on
one side believing in one supreme God, Lord of heaven and earth, and his
generation stood on the other side, believing that there were many gods.
Isaiah, however, does not pose as the discoverer of the truth he
preaches; he does not present it as a new revelation, nor put it in a
formula. He takes it for granted, and proceeds to bring its moral
influence to bear. He will infect men with his own utter conviction of
it, in order that he may strengthen their character and guide them by
paths of safety. His speech to Ahaz is an exhibition of the moral and
rational effects of believing in Providence. Ahaz is a sample of the
_character_ polytheism produced; the state of mind and heart to which
Isaiah exhorts him is that induced by belief in one righteous and
almighty God. We can make the contrast clear to ourselves by a very
definite figure.
The difference, which is made to the character and habits of men if the
country they live in has a powerful government or not, is well known. If
there be no such central authority, it is a case of every man's hand
against his neighbour. Men walk armed to the teeth. A constant attitude
of fear and suspicion warps the whole nature. The passions are excited
and magnified; the intelligence and judgement are dwarfed. Just the
same after its kind is life to the man or tribe, who believe, that the
world in which they dwell and the life they share with others have no
central authority. They walk armed with prejudices, superstitions and
selfishnesses. They create, like Ahaz, their own providences, and still,
like him, feel insecure. Everything is exaggerated by them; in each evil
there lurks to their imagination unlimited hostility. They are without
breadth of view or length of patience. But let men believe that life has
a central authority, that God is supreme, and they will fling their
prejudices and superstitions to the winds, now no more needed than the
antiquated fortresses
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/39767