Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 12

110).

III. G.o.d'S TABLE IN THE MIDST OF THE ENEMIES (vv. 19-26).

This patient purpose of G.o.d Isaiah now proceeds to describe in its details. Every line of his description has its loveliness, and is to be separately appreciated. There is perhaps no fairer prospect from our prophet's many windows. It is not argument nor a programme, but a series of rapid glimpses, struck out by language, which often wants logical connection, but never fails to make us see.

To begin with, one thing is sure: the continuance of the national existence. Isaiah is true to his original vision--the survival of a remnant. _For a people in Zion--there shall be abiding in Jerusalem._ So the brief essential is flashed forth. _Thou shalt surely weep no more; surely He will be gracious unto thee at the voice of thy crying; with His hearing of thee He will answer thee._ Thus much of general promise had been already given. Now upon the vagueness of the Lord's delay Isaiah paints realistic details, only, however, that he may make more vivid the real presence of the Lord. The siege shall surely come, with its sorely concrete privations, but the _Lord_ will be there, equally distinct. _And though the Lord give you the bread of penury and the water of tribulation_--perhaps the technical name for siege rations--_yet shall not thy Teacher hide Himself any more, but thine eyes shall ever be seeing thy Teacher; and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way: walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand or when ye turn to the left._ Real, concrete sorrows, these are they that make the heavenly Teacher real! It is linguistically possible, and more in harmony with the rest of the pa.s.sage, to turn _teachers_, as the English version has it, into the singular, and to render it by _Revealer_. The word is an active participle, "Moreh," from the same verb as the noun "Torah," which is constantly translated "Law"

in our version, but is, in the Prophets at least, more nearly equivalent to "instruction," or to our modern term "revelation" (cf. ver. 9).

Looking thus to the One Revealer, and hearkening to the One Voice, _the lying and rebellious children_ shall at last be restored to that capacity for truth and obedience the loss of which has been their ruin.

Devoted to the Holy One of Israel, they shall scatter their idols as loathsome (ver. 22). But thereupon a wonder is to happen. As the besieged people, conscious of the One Great Presence in the midst of their encompa.s.sed city, cast their idols through the gates and over the walls, a marvellous vision of s.p.a.ce and light and fulness of fresh food bursts upon their starved and straitened souls (ver. 23). Promise more sympathetic was never uttered to a besieged and famished city. Mark that all down the pa.s.sage there is no mention of the noise or instruments of battle. The prophet has not spoken of the besiegers, who they may be, how they may come, nor of the fashion of their war, but only of the effects of the siege on those within: confinement, scant and bitter rations. And now he is almost wholly silent about the breaking up of the investing army and the trail of their slaughter. No battle breaks this siege, but a vision of openness and plenty dawns noiselessly over its famine and closeness. It is not vengeance or blood that an exhausted and penitent people thirst after. But as they have been caged in a fortress, narrow, dark and stony, so they thirst for the sight of the sower, and the drop of the rain on the broken, brown earth, and the juicy corn, and the meadow for their cribbed cattle, and the noise of brooks and waterfalls, and above and about it all fulness of light. _And He shall give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the ground withal, and bread, even the increase of the ground, and it shall be juicy and fat; thy cattle shall feed that day in a broad meadow. And the oxen and the young a.s.ses that till the ground shall eat savoury provender, winnowed with the shovel and with the fan. And there shall be upon every lofty mountain and upon every lifted hill rivers, streams of water, in the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall. And the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the hurt of His people and healeth the stroke of their wound._ It is one of Isaiah's fairest visions, and he is very much to be blamed who forces its beauty of nature into an allegory of spiritual things. Here literally G.o.d spreads His people a table in the midst of their enemies.

IV. THE NAME OF THE LORD (vv. 27-33).

But Isaiah lays down "the oaten pipe" and lifts again a brazen trumpet to his lips. Between him and that sunny landscape of the future, of whose pastoral details he has so sweetly sung, roll up now the uncouth ma.s.ses of the a.s.syrian invasion, not yet fully gathered, far less broken. We are back in the present again, and the whole horizon is clouded.

The pa.s.sage does not look like one from which comfort or edification can be derived, but it is of extreme interest. The first two verses, for instance, only require a little a.n.a.lysis to open a most instructive glimpse into the prophet's inner thoughts about the a.s.syrian progress, and show us how they work towards the expression of its full meaning.

_Behold, the Name of Jehovah cometh from afar--burning His anger and awful the uplifting smoke; His lips are full of wrath, and His tongue as fire that devoureth; and His breath is as an overflowing torrent--even unto the neck it reacheth--to shake the nations in a sieve of destruction, and a bridle that leadeth astray on the jaws of the peoples._

_The Name of Jehovah_ is the phrase the prophets use when they wish to tell us of the personal presence of G.o.d. When we hear a name cried out, we understand immediately that a person is there. So when the prophet calls, _Behold, the Name of Jehovah_, in face of the prodigious advance of a.s.syria, we understand that he has caught some intuition of G.o.d's presence in that uplifting of the nations of the north at the word of the great King and their resistless sweep southward upon Palestine. In that movement G.o.d is personally present. The Divine presence Isaiah then describes in curiously mingled metaphor, which proves how gradually it was that he struggled to a knowledge of its purpose there. First of all he describes the advance of a.s.syria as a thunderstorm, heavy clouds and darting, devouring fire. His imagination pictures a great face of wrath.

The thick curtains of cloud as they roll over one another suggest the heavy lips, and the lightnings the fiery tongue. Then the figure pa.s.ses from heaven to earth. The thunderstorm has burst, and becomes the _mountain torrent_, which speedily _reaches the necks_ of those who are caught in its bed. But then the prophet's conscience suggests something more than sudden and sheer force in this invasion, and the _tossing_ of the torrent naturally leads him to express this new element in the figure of _a sieve_. His thought about the a.s.syrian flood thus pa.s.ses from one of simple force and rush to one of judgement and being well kept in hand. He sees its ultimate check at Jerusalem, and so his last figure of it is the figure of _a bridle_, or _la.s.so_, such as is thrown upon the jaws of a wild animal when you wish to catch and tame him.

This gradual progress from the sense of sheer wild force, through that of personal wrath, to discipline and sparing is very interesting. Vague and chaotic that disaster rolled up the horizon upon Judah. _It cometh from afar._ The politicians fled from it to their refuge behind the Egyptian Pretence. But Isaiah bids them face it. The longer they look, the more will conscience tell them that the unavoidable wrath of G.o.d is in it; no bl.u.s.tering Rahab will be able to hide them from the anger of the Face that lowers there. But let them look longer still, and the unrelieved features of destruction will change to a hand that sifts and checks, the torrent will become a sieve, and the disaster show itself well held in by the power of their own G.o.d.

So wildly and impersonally still do the storms of sorrow and disaster roll up the horizon on men's eyes, and we fly in vague terror from them to our Egyptian refuges. So still does conscience tell us it is futile to flee from the anger of G.o.d, and we crouch hopeless beneath the rush of imaginations of unchecked wrath, blackening the heavens and turning every path of life to a tossing torrent. May it then be granted us to have some prophet at our side to bid us face our disaster once more, and see the discipline and judgement of the Lord, the tossing only of His careful sieve, in the wild and cruel waves! We may not be poets like Isaiah nor able to put the processes of our faith into such splendid metaphors as he, but faith is given us to follow the same course as his thoughts did, and to struggle till she arrives at the consciousness of G.o.d in the most uncouth judgements that darken her horizon--the consciousness of G.o.d present not only to smite, but to sift, and in the end to spare.

Of the angel who led Israel to the land of promise, G.o.d said, _My Name is in him_. Our faith is not perfect till we can, like Isaiah, feel the same of the blackest angel, the heaviest disaster, G.o.d can send us, and be able to spell it out articulately: _The LORD, the LORD, a G.o.d merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth_.

For delivery, says Isaiah, shall come to the people of G.o.d in the crisis, as sudden and as startling into song as the delivery from Egypt was. _Ye shall have a song as in the night when a holy feast is kept, and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountain of the LORD, to the Rock of Israel._

After this interval of solemn gladness, the storm and fire break out afresh, and rage again through the pa.s.sage. But their direction is reversed, and whereas they had been shown rolling up the horizon as towards Judah, they are now shown rolling down the horizon in pursuit of the baffled a.s.syrian. The music of the verses is crashing. _And the LORD shall cause the peal[47] of His voice to be heard, and the lighting down of His arm to be seen in the fury of anger, yea flame of devouring fire--bursting and torrent and hailstones. For from the voice of the LORD shall the a.s.syrian be scattered when He shall smite with the rod.

And every pa.s.sage of the rod of fate which the LORD bringeth down upon him shall be with tabrets and harps, and in battles of waving shall he be fought against._ The meaning is obscure, but palpable. Probably the verse describes the ritual of the sacrifice to Moloch, to which there is no doubt the next verse alludes. To sympathize with the prophet's figure, we need of course an amount of information about the details of that ritual which we are very far from possessing. But Isaiah's meaning is evidently this. The destruction of the a.s.syrian host will be liker a holocaust than a battle, like one of those fatal sacrifices to Moloch which are directed by the solemn waving of a staff, and accompanied by the music, not of war, but of festival. _Battles of waving_ is a very obscure phrase, but the word translated _waving_ is the technical term for the waving of the victim before the sacrifice to signify its dedication to the deity; "and these _battles of waving_ may perhaps have taken place in the fashion in which single victims were thrown from one spear to another till death ensued."[48] At all events, it is evident that Isaiah means to suggest that the a.s.syrian dispersion is a religious act, a solemn holocaust rather than one of this earth's ordinary battles, and directed by Jehovah Himself from heaven. This becomes clear enough in the next verse: _For a Topheth hath been set in order beforehand; yea, for Moloch is it arranged; He hath made it deep and broad; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the LORD, like a torrent of brimstone, shall kindle it_. So the a.s.syrian power was in the end to go up in flame.

[47] So Dr. B. Davis, quoted by Cheyne.

[48] So Bredenkamp in his recent commentary on Isaiah.

We postpone remarks on Isaiah's sense of the fierceness of the Divine righteousness till we reach his even finer expression of it in chap.

x.x.xiii.

CHAPTER XIV.

_THREE TRUTHS ABOUT G.o.d._

ISAIAH x.x.xi. (ABOUT 702 B.C.).

Chap. x.x.xi., which forms an appendage to chaps. xxix. and x.x.x., can scarcely be reckoned among the more important prophecies of Isaiah. It is a repet.i.tion of the principles which the prophet has already proclaimed in connection with the faithless intrigues of Judah for an alliance with Egypt, and it was published at a time when the statesmen of Judah were further involved in these intrigues, when events were moving faster, and the prophet had to speak with more hurried words.

Truths now familiar to us are expressed in less powerful language. But the chapter has its own value; it is remarkable for three very unusual descriptions of G.o.d, which govern the following exposition of it. They rise in climax, enforcing three truths:--that in the government of life we must take into account G.o.d's wisdom; we must be prepared to find many of His providences grim and savage-looking; but we must also believe that He is most tender and jealous for His people.

I. YET HE ALSO IS WISE (vv. 1-3).

We must suppose the negotiations with Egypt to have taken for the moment a favourable turn, and the statesmen who advocated them to be congratulating themselves upon some consequent addition to the fighting strength of Judah. They could point to many chariots and a strong body of cavalry in proof of their own wisdom and refutation of the prophet's maxim, _In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength; in returning and rest shall ye be saved_.

Isaiah simply answers their self-congratulation with the utterance of a new Woe, and it is in this that the first of the three extraordinary descriptions of G.o.d is placed. _Woe unto them that go down to Egypt for help; upon horses do they stay, and trust in chariots because they are many, and in hors.e.m.e.n because they are very strong: but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, and Jehovah they do not seek. Yet He also is wise._ You have been clever and successful, but have you forgotten that _G.o.d also is wise_, that He too has His policy, and acts reasonably and consistently? You think you have been making history; but G.o.d also works in history, and surely, to put it on the lowest ground, with as much cleverness and persistence as you do. _Yet He also is wise, and will bring evil, and will not call back His words, but will arise against the house of the evil-doers, and against the help of them that work iniquity._

This satire was the shaft best fitted to pierce the folly of the rulers of Judah. Wisdom, a reasonable plan for their aims and prudence in carrying it out, was the last thing they thought of a.s.sociating with G.o.d, whom they relegated to what they called their religion--their temples, worship and poetry. When their emotions were stirred by solemn services, or under great disaster, or in the hour of death, they remembered G.o.d and it seemed natural to them that in these great exceptions of life He should interfere; but in their politics and their trade, in the common course and conduct of life, they ignored Him and put their trust in their own wisdom. They limited G.o.d to the ceremonies and exceptional occasions of life, when they looked for His glory or miraculous a.s.sistance, but they never thought that in their ordinary ways He had any interest or design.

The forgetfulness, against which Isaiah directs this shaft of satire, is the besetting sin of very religious people, of very successful people, and of very clever people.

It is the temptation of an ordinary Christian, church-going people, like ourselves, with a religion so full of marvellous mercies, and so blessed with regular opportunities of worship, to think of G.o.d only in connection with these, and practically to ignore that along the far greater stretches of life He has any interest or purpose regarding us.

Formally-religious people treat G.o.d as if He were simply a const.i.tutional sovereign, to step in at emergencies, and for the rest to play a nominal and ceremonial part in the conduct of their lives.

Ignoring the Divine wisdom and ceaseless providence of G.o.d, and couching their hearts upon easy views of His benevolence, they have no other thought of Him, than as a philanthropic magician, whose power is reserved to extricate men when they have got past helping themselves.

From the earliest times that way of regarding G.o.d has been prevalent, and religious teachers have never failed to stigmatize it with the hardest name for folly. _Fools_, says the Psalmist, _are afflicted when they draw near unto the gates of death; then_, only then, _do they cry unto the Lord in their trouble_. _Thou fool!_ says Christ of the man who kept G.o.d out of the account of his life. G.o.d is not mocked, although we ignore half His being and confine our religion to such facile views of His nature. With this sarcasm, Isaiah reminds us that it is not a Fool who is on the throne of the universe; yet is the Being whom the imaginations of some men place there any better? O wise men, _G.o.d also is wise_. Not by fits and starts of a benevolence similar to that of our own foolish and inconsistent hearts does He work. Consistency, reason and law are the methods of His action; and they apply closely, irretrievably, to all of our life. Hath He promised evil? Then evil will proceed. Let us believe that G.o.d keeps His word; that He is thoroughly attentive to all we do; that His will concerns the whole of our life.

But the temptation to refuse to G.o.d even ordinary wisdom is also the temptation of very successful and very clever people, such as these Jewish politicians fancied themselves to be, or such as the Rich Fool in the parable. They have overcome all they have matched themselves against, and feel as if they were to be masters of their own future. Now the Bible and the testimony of men invariably declare that G.o.d has one way of meeting such fools--the way Isaiah suggests here. G.o.d meets them with their own weapons; He outmatches them in their own fashion. In the eighteenth Psalm it is written, _With the pure Thou wilt show Thyself pure, and with the perverse Thou wilt show Thyself froward_. The Rich Fool congratulates himself that his soul is his own; says G.o.d, _This night thy soul shall be required of thee_. The Jewish politicians pride themselves on their wisdom; _Yet G.o.d also is wise_, says Isaiah significantly. After Moscow Napoleon is reported to have exclaimed, "The Almighty is too strong for me." But perhaps the most striking a.n.a.logy to this satire of Isaiah is to be found in the "Confessions" of that Jew, from whose living sepulchre we are so often startled with weird echoes of the laughter of the ancient prophets of his race. When Heine, Germany's greatest satirist, lay upon a bed to which his evil living had brought him before his time, and the pride of art, which had been, as he says, his G.o.d, was at last crushed, he tells us what it was that crushed him. They were singing his songs in every street of his native land, and his fame had gone out through the world, while he lay an exile and paralysed upon his "mattress-grave." "Alas!" he cries, "the irony of Heaven weighs heavily upon me. The great Author of the universe, the celestial Aristophanes, wished to show me, the petty, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my most trenchant satires are only clumsy patchwork compared with His, and how immeasurably He excels me in humour and colossal wit." That is just a soul writing in its own heart's blood this terrible warning of Isaiah: _Yet G.o.d also is wise_.

_Yea, the Egyptians are men, and not G.o.d, and their horses flesh, and not spirit; and when Jehovah shall stretch out His hand, both he that helpeth shall stumble, and he that is holpen shall fall, and they all shall perish together._

II. THE LION AND HIS PREY (ver. 4).

But notwithstanding what he has said about G.o.d destroying men who trust in their own cleverness, Isaiah goes on to a.s.sert that G.o.d is always ready to save what is worth saving. The people, the city, His own city--G.o.d will save that. To express G.o.d's persistent grace towards Jerusalem, Isaiah uses two figures borrowed from the beasts. Both of them are truly Homeric, and fire the imagination at once; but the first is not one we should have expected to find as a figure of the saving grace of G.o.d. Yet Isaiah knows it is not enough for men to remember how wise G.o.d always is. They need also to be reminded how grim and cruel He must sometimes appear, even in His saving providences. _For thus saith Jehovah unto me: Like as when the lion growleth, and the young lion over his prey, if a mob of shepherds be called forth against him, from their voice he will not shrink in dismay, nor for their noise abase himself; so shall Jehovah of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion and the hill thereof._ A lion with a lamb in his claws, growling over it, while a crowd of shepherds come up against him; afraid to go near enough to kill him, they try to frighten him away by shouting at him. But he holds his prey unshrinking.

It is a figure that startles at first. To liken G.o.d with a saving hold upon His own to a wild lion with his claws in the prey! But horror plays the part of a good emphasis; while if we look into the figure, we shall feel our horror change to appreciation. There is something majestic in that picture of the lion with the shouting shepherds, too afraid to strike him. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase himself for the noise of them._ Is it, after all, an unworthy figure of the Divine Claimant for this city, who kept unceasing hold upon her after His own manner, mysterious and lionlike to men, undisturbed by the screams, formulas, and prayers of her mob of politicians and treaty-mongers? For these are the _shepherds_ Isaiah means--sham shepherds, the shrieking crew of politicians, with their treaties and military display. G.o.d will save and carry Jerusalem His own way, paying no heed to such. _He will not be dismayed at their voice, nor abase Himself for the noise of them._

There is more than the unyielding persistency of Divine grace taught here. There is that to begin with. G.o.d will never let go what He has made His own: the souls He has redeemed from sin, the societies He has redeemed from barbarism, the characters He has hold of, the lives He has laid His hand upon. Persistency of saving grace--let us learn that confidently in the parable. But that is only half of what it is meant to teach. Look at the shepherds: shepherds shouting round a lion; why does Isaiah put it that way, and not as David did--lions growling round a brave shepherd, with the lamb in his arms? Because it so appeared then in the life Isaiah was picturing, because it often looks the same in real life still. These politicians--they seemed, they played the part of, shepherds; and Jehovah, who persistently frustrated their plans for the salvation of the State--He looked the lion, delivering Jerusalem to destruction. And very often to men does this arrangement of the parts repeat itself; and while human friends are anxious and energetic about them, G.o.d Himself appears in providences more lionlike than shepherdly.

He grasps with the savage paw of death some one as dear to us as that city was to Isaiah. He rends our body or soul or estate. And friends and our own thoughts gather round the cruel bereavement or disaster with remonstrance and complaint. Our hearts cry out, doing, like shepherds, their best to scare by prayer and cries the foe they are too weak to kill. We all know the scene, and how shabby and mean that mob of human remonstrances looks in face of the great Foe, majestic though inarticulate, that with sullen persistence carries off its prey. All we can say in such times is that if it is G.o.d who is the lion, then it is for the best. For _though He slay me, yet will I trust Him_; and, after all, it is safer to rely on the mercies of G.o.d, lionlike though they be, than on the weak benevolences and officious pities of the best of human advisers. "Thy will be done"--let perfect reverence teach us to feel that, even when providence seems as savage as men that day thought G.o.d's will towards Jerusalem.

In addition then to remembering, when men seem by their cleverness and success to rule life, that G.o.d is wiser and His plans more powerful than theirs, we are not to forget, when men seem more anxious and merciful than His dark providence, that for all their argument and action His will shall not alter. But now we are to hear that this will, so hard and mysterious, is as merciful and tender as a mother's.

III. THE MOTHER-BIRD AND HER NEST (ver. 5).

_As birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts cover Jerusalem, He will cover and deliver it: He will pa.s.s over and preserve it._ At last we are through dark providence, to the very heart of the Almighty. The meaning is familiar from its natural simplicity and frequent use in Scripture.

Two features of it our version has not reproduced. The word _birds_ means the smaller kind of feathered creatures, and the word _hovering_ is feminine in the original: _As little mother-birds hovering, so will Jehovah of hosts protect Jerusalem_. We have been watching in spring the hedge where we know is a nest. Suddenly the mother-bird, who has been sitting on a branch close by, flutters off her perch, pa.s.ses backwards and forwards, with flapping wings that droop nervously towards the nest over her young. A hawk is in the sky, and till he disappears she will hover--the incarnation of motherly anxiety. This is Isaiah's figure. His native city, on which he poured so much of his heart in lyrics and parables, was again in danger. Sennacherib was descending upon her; and the pity of Isaiah's own heart for her, evil though she was, suggested to him a motherhood of pity in the breast of G.o.d. The suggestion G.o.d Himself approved. Centuries after, when He a.s.sumed our flesh and spoke our language, when He put His love into parables lowly and familiar to our affections, there were none of them more beautiful than that which He uttered of this same city, weeping as He spake: _O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen gathereth her brood under her wings, and ye would not!_

With such fountains in Scripture, we need not, as some have done, exalt the Virgin, or virtually make a fourth person in the G.o.dhead, and that a woman, in order to satisfy those natural longings of the heart which the widespread worship of the mother of Jesus tells us are so peremptory.

For all fulness dwelleth in G.o.d Himself. Not only may we rejoice in that pity and wise provision for our wants, in that pardon and generosity, which we a.s.sociate with the name of father, but also in the wakefulness, the patience, the love, lovelier with fear, which make a mother's heart so dear and indispensable. We cannot tell along what wakened nerve the grace of G.o.d may reach our hearts; but Scripture has a medicine for every pain. And if any feel their weakness as little children feel it, let them know that the Spirit of G.o.d broods over them, as a mother over her babe; and if any are in pain or anxiety, and there is no human heart to suffer with them, let them know that as closely as a mother may come to suffer with her child, and as sensitive as she is to its danger, so sensitive is G.o.d Almighty to theirs, and that He gives them proof of their preciousness to Him by suffering with them.

How these three descriptions meet the three failings of our faith! We forget that G.o.d is ceaselessly at work in wisdom in our lives. We forget that G.o.d must sometimes, even when He is saving us, seem lionlike and cruel. We forget that "the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind."

Having thus made vivid the presence of their Lord to the purged eyes of His people, patient, powerful in order, wise in counsel, persistent in grace, and, last of all, very tender, Isaiah concludes with a cry to the people to turn to this Lord, from whom they have so deeply revolted. Let them cast away their idols, and there shall be no fear of the result of the a.s.syrian invasion. The a.s.syrian shall fall, not by the sword of man, but the immediate stroke of G.o.d. _And his rock shall pa.s.s away by reason of terror, and his princes shall be dismayed at the ensign, saith the Lord, whose fire is in Zion, and His furnace in Jerusalem._ And so Isaiah closes this series of prophecies on the keynote with which it opened in the first verse of chap. xxix.: that Jerusalem is Ariel--_the hearth and altar, the dwelling-place and sanctuary, of G.o.d_.