Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 17

At Jerusalem we are within a day's journey of any part of the territory of Judah. We feel the kingdom throb to its centre at a.s.syria's first footfall on the border. The nation's life is shuddering in upon its capital, couriers dashing up with the first news; fugitives hard upon them; palace, a.r.s.enal, market and temple thrown into commotion; the politicians busy; the engineers hard at work completing the fortifications, leading the suburban wells to a reservoir within the walls, levelling every house and tree outside which could give shelter to the besiegers, and heaping up the material on the ramparts, till there lies nothing but a great, bare, waterless circle round a high-banked fortress. Across this bareness the lines of fugitives streaming to the gates; provincial officials and their retinues; soldiers whom Hezekiah had sent out to meet the foe, returning without even the dignity of defeat upon them; husbandmen, with cattle and remnants of grain in disorder; women and children; the knaves, cowards and helpless of the whole kingdom pouring their fear, dissoluteness and disease into the already-unsettled populace of Jerusalem. Inside the walls opposing political factions and a weak king; idle crowds, swaying to every rumour and intrigue; the ordinary restraints and regularities of life suspended, even patriotism gone with counsel and courage, but in their place fear and shame and greed of life. Such was the state in which Jerusalem faced the hour of her visitation.

Gradually the Visitant came near over the thirty miles which lay between the capital and the border. Signs of the a.s.syrian advance were given in the sky, and night after night the watchers on Mount Zion, seeing the glare in the west, must have speculated which of the cities of Judah was being burned. Clouds of smoke across the heavens from prairie and forest fires told how war, even if it pa.s.sed, would leave a trail of famine; and men thought with breaking hearts of the villages and fields, heritage of the tribes of old, that were now bare to the foot and the fire of the foreigner. _Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate as the overthrow of strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cuc.u.mbers. Except Jehovah of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, we should have been like unto Gomorrah._[57] Then came touch of the enemy, the appearance of armed bands, vistas down Jerusalem's favourite valleys of chariots, squadrons of hors.e.m.e.n emerging upon the plateaus to north and west of the city, heavy siege-towers and swarms of men innumerable. _And Elam bare the quiver, with troops of men and hors.e.m.e.n; and Kir uncovered the shield._ At last they saw their fears of fifty years face to face! Far-away names were standing by their gates, actual bowmen and flashing shields! As Jerusalem gazed upon the terrible a.s.syrian armaments, how many of her inhabitants remembered Isaiah's words delivered a generation before!--_Behold, they shall come with speed swiftly; none shall be weary or stumble among them; neither shall the string of their loins be lax nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses' hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a lion: they shall roar like young lions. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is stretched out still._

[57] Chap. i. 7-9.

There were, however, two supports, on which that distracted populace within the walls still steadied themselves. The one was the Temple-worship, the other the Egyptian alliance.

History has many remarkable instances of peoples betaking themselves in the hour of calamity to the energetic discharge of the public rites of religion. But such a resort is seldom, if ever, a real moral conversion.

It is merely physical nervousness, apprehension for life, clutching at the one thing within reach that feels solid, which it abandons as soon as panic has pa.s.sed. When the crowds in Jerusalem betook themselves to the Temple, with unwonted wealth of sacrifice, Isaiah denounced this as hypocrisy and futility. _To what purpose is the mult.i.tude of your sacrifices unto Me? saith Jehovah.... I am weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide Mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear_ (i. 11-15).

Isaiah might have spared his scornful orders to the people to desist from worship. Soon afterwards they abandoned it of their own will, but from motives very different from those urged by him. The second support to which Jerusalem clung was the Egyptian alliance--the pet project of the party then in power. They had carried it to a successful issue, taunting Isaiah with their success.[58] He had continued to denounce it, and now the hour was approaching when their cleverness and confidence were to be put to the test. It was known in Jerusalem that an Egyptian army was advancing to Sennacherib, and politicians and people awaited the encounter with anxiety.

[58] See p. 238.

We are aware what happened. Egypt was beaten at Eltekeh; the alliance was stamped a failure; Jerusalem's last worldly hope was taken from her.

When the news reached the city, something took place, of which our moral judgement tells us more than any actual record of facts. The Government of Hezekiah gave way; the rulers, whose courage and patriotism had been identified with the Egyptian alliance, lost all hope for their country, and fled, as Isaiah puts it, _en ma.s.se_ (xxii. 3). There was no battle, no defeat at arms (_id._ 2, 3); but the Jewish State collapsed.

Then, when the last material hope of Judah fell, fell her religion too.

The Egyptian disappointment, while it drove the rulers out of their false policies, drove the people out of their unreal worship. What had been a city of devotees became in a moment a city of revellers. Formerly all had been sacrifices and worship, but now feasting and blasphemy.

_Behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_ (_id._ 13. The reference of ver. 12 is probably to chap. i.).

Now all Isaiah's ministry had been directed just against these two things: the Egyptian alliance and the purely formal observance of religion--trust in the world and trust in religiousness. And together both of these had given way, and the a.s.syrian was at the gates. Truly it was the hour of Isaiah's vindication. Yet--and this is the tragedy--it had come too late. The prophet could not use it. The two things he said would collapse had collapsed, but for the people there seemed now no help to be justified from the thing which he said would remain. What was the use of the city's deliverance, when the people themselves had failed! The feelings of triumph, which the prophet might have expressed, were swallowed up in unselfish grief over the fate of his wayward and abandoned Jerusalem.

_What aileth thee now_--and in these words we can hear the old man addressing his fickle child, whose changefulness by this time he knew so well--_what aileth thee now that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops_--we see him standing at his door watching this ghastly holiday--_O thou that art full of shoutings, a tumultuous city, a joyous town?_ What are you rejoicing at in such an hour as this, when you have not even the bravery of your soldiers to celebrate, when you are without that pride which has brought songs from the lips of a defeated people as they learned that their sons had fallen with their faces to the foe, and has made even the wounds of the dead borne through the gate lips of triumph, calling to festival! _For thy slain are not slain with the sword, neither are they dead in battle._

_All thy chiefs fled in heaps; Without bow they were taken: All thine that were found were taken in heaps; From far had they run.

Wherefore I say, Look away from me; Let me make bitterness bitterer by weeping.

Press not to comfort me For the ruin of the daughter of my people._

Urge not your mad holiday upon me! _For a day of discomfiture and of breaking and of perplexity hath the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, in the valley of vision, a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain._ These few words of prose, which follow the pathetic elegy, have a finer pathos still. The c.u.mulative force of the successive clauses is very impressive: _disappointment_ at the eleventh hour; the sense of a being _trampled_ and overborne by sheer brute force; the counsels, courage, hope and faith of fifty years crushed to blank _perplexity_, and all this from Himself--_the Lord, Jehovah of hosts_--in the very _valley of vision_, the home of prophecy; as if He had meant of purpose to destroy these long confidences of the past on the floor where they had been wrestled for and a.s.serted, and not by the force of the foe, but by the folly of His own people, to make them ashamed. The last clause crashes out the effect of it all; every spiritual rampart and refuge torn down, there is nothing left but an appeal to the hills to fall and cover us--_a breaking down of the wall and a crying to the mountain_.

On the brink of the precipice, Isaiah draws back for a moment, to describe with some of his old fire the appearance of the besiegers (vv.

6-8_a_). And this suggests what kind of preparation Jerusalem had made for her foe--every kind, says Isaiah, but the supreme one. The a.r.s.enal, Solomon's _forest-house_, with its cedar pillars, had been looked to (ver. 8), the fortifications inspected and increased, and the suburban waters brought within them (vv. 9-11_a_). _But ye looked not unto Him that had done this_, who had brought this providence upon you; _neither had ye respect unto Him that fashioned it long ago_, whose own plan it had been. To your alliances and fortifications you fled in the hour of calamity, but not to Him in whose guidance the course of calamity lay.

And therefore, when your engineering and diplomacy failed you, your religion vanished with them. _In that day did the Lord, Jehovah of hosts, call to weeping, and to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth; but, behold, joy and gladness, slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating flesh and drinking wine: Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we shall die._ It was the dropping of the mask. For half a century this people had worshipped G.o.d, but they had never trusted Him beyond the limits of their treaties and their bulwarks. And so when their allies were defeated, and their walls began to tremble, their religion, bound up with these things, collapsed also; they ceased even to be men, crying like beasts, _Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_. For such a state of mind Isaiah will hold out no promise; it is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and for it there is no forgiveness. _And Jehovah of hosts revealed Himself in mine ears. Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts._

Back forty years the word had been, _Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again and be healed._ What happened now was only what was foretold then: _And if there be yet a tenth in it, it shall again be for consumption._ That radical revision of judgement was now being literally fulfilled, when Isaiah, sure at last of his remnant within the walls of Jerusalem, was forced for their sin to condemn even them to death.

Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate survival of a remnant. How firmly he believed in it could not be more clearly ill.u.s.trated than by the fact that when he had so absolutely devoted his fellow-citizens to destruction he also took the most practical means for securing a better political future. If there is any reason, it can only be this, for putting the second section of chap. xxii., which advocates a change of ministry in the city (vv. 15-22), so close to the first, which sees ahead nothing but destruction for the State (vv. 1-14).

The _mayor of the palace_ at this time was one Shebna, also called _minister_ or _deputy_ (lit. _friend_ of the king). That his father is not named implies perhaps that Shebna was a foreigner; his own name betrays a Syrian origin; and he has been justly supposed to be the leader of the party then in power, whose policy was the Egyptian alliance, and whom in these latter years Isaiah had so frequently denounced as the root of Judah's bitterness. To this unfamilied intruder, who had sought to establish himself in Jerusalem, after the manner of those days, by hewing himself a great sepulchre, Isaiah brought sentence of violent banishment: _Behold, Jehovah will be hurling, hurling thee away, thou big man, and crumpling, crumpling thee together. He will roll, roll thee on, thou rolling-stone, like a ball_ thrown out _on broad level ground; there shall thou die, and there shall be the chariots of thy glory, thou shame of the house of thy lord. And I thrust thee from thy post, and from thy station do they pull thee down_.

This vagabond was not to die in his bed, nor to be gathered in his big tomb to the people on whom he had foisted himself. He should continue a _rolling-stone_. For him, like Cain, there was a land of Nod; and upon it he was to find a vagabond's death.

To fill this upstart's place, Isaiah solemnly designated a man with a father: Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah. The formulas he uses are perhaps the official ones customary upon induction to an office. But it may be also, that Isaiah has woven into these some expressions of even greater promise than usual. For this change of office-bearers was critical, and the overthrow of the "party of action" meant to Isaiah the beginning of the blessed future. _And it shall come to pa.s.s that in that day I will call My servant Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah; and I will clothe him with thy robe, and with thy girdle will I strengthen him, and thine administration will I give into his hand, and he shall be for a father to the inhabitant of Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. And I will set the key of the house of David upon his shoulder; and he shall open, and none shut: and he shall shut, and none open. And I will hammer him in, a nail in a firm place, and he shall be for a throne of glory to his father's house._ Thus to the last Isaiah will not allow Shebna to forget that he is without root among the people of G.o.d, that he has neither father nor family.

But a family is a temptation, and the weight of it may drag even the man of the Lord's own hammering out of his place. This very year we find Eliakim in Shebna's post,[59] and Shebna reduced to be secretary; but Eliakim's family seem to have taken advantage of their relative's position, and either at the time he was designated, or more probably later, Isaiah wrote two sentences of warning upon the dangers of nepotism. Catching at the figure, with which his designation of Eliakim closed, that Eliakim would be a peg in a solid wall, a throne on which the glory of his father's house might settle, Isaiah reminds the much-enc.u.mbered statesman that the firmest peg will give way if you hang too much on it, the strongest man be pulled down by his dependent and indolent family. _They shall hang upon him all the weight of his father's house, the scions and the offspring_ (terms contrasted as degrees of worth), _all the little vessels, from the vessels of cups to all the vessels of flagons_. _In that day, saith Jehovah of hosts, shall the peg that was knocked into a firm place give way, and it shall be knocked out and fall, and down shall be cut the burden that was upon it, for Jehovah hath spoken._

[59] Isa. x.x.xvi. 3.

So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of n.o.body. The fate of the overburdened nail is as grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pa.s.s this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully a.n.a.lysed each verse, restored to the words their exact shade of signification, and set them in their proper contrasts, we perceive the outlines of two social dramas, which it requires very little imagination to invest with engrossing moral interest.

CHAPTER XX.

_THE TURN OF THE TIDE: MORAL EFFECTS OF FORGIVENESS._

ISAIAH xxii., contrasted with x.x.xiii. (701 B.C.).

The collapse of Jewish faith and patriotism in the face of the enemy was complete. Final and absolute did Isaiah's sentence ring out: _Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith Jehovah of hosts._ So we learn from chap. xxii., written, as we conceive, in 701, when the a.s.syrian armies had at last invested Jerusalem. But in chap.

x.x.xiii., which critics unite in placing a few months later in the same year, Isaiah's tone is entirely changed. He hurls the woe of the Lord upon the a.s.syrians; confidently announces their immediate destruction; turns, while the whole city's faith hangs upon him, in supplication to the Lord; and announces the stability of Jerusalem, her peace, her glory and the forgiveness of all her sins. It is this great moral difference between chaps. xxii. and x.x.xiii.--prophecies that must have been delivered within a few months of each other--which this chapter seeks to expound.

In spite of her collapse, as pictured in chap. xxii., Jerusalem was not taken. Her rulers fled; her people, as if death were certain, betook themselves to dissipation; and yet the city did not fall into the hands of the a.s.syrian. Sennacherib himself does not pretend to have taken Jerusalem. He tells us how closely he invested Jerusalem, but he does not add that he took it, a silence which is the more significant that he records the capture of every other town which his armies attempted. He says that Hezekiah offered him tribute, and details the amount he received. He adds that the tribute was not paid at Jerusalem (as it would have been had Jerusalem been conquered), but that for "the payment of the tribute and the performance of homage" Hezekiah "despatched his envoy"[60] to him when he was at some distance from Jerusalem. All this agrees with the Bible narrative. In the book of Kings we are told how Hezekiah sent to the King of a.s.syria at Lachish, saying, _I have offended; return from me; that which thou puttest upon me I will bear_.

_And the King of a.s.syria appointed unto Hezekiah, King of Judah, three hundred talents of silver and thirty talents of gold. And Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house of Jehovah and in the treasures of the king's house. At the same time did Hezekiah cut off the gold from the doors of the temple of Jehovah, and from the pillars which Hezekiah, King of Judah, had overlaid, and gave it to the King of a.s.syria._[61] It was indeed a sore submission, when even the Temple of the Lord had to be stripped of its gold. But it purchased the relief of the city; and no price was too high to pay for that at such a moment as the present, when the populace was demoralised. We may even see Isaiah's hand in the submission. The integrity of Jerusalem was the one fact on which the word of the Lord had been pledged, on which the promised remnant could be rallied. The a.s.syrian must not be able to say that he has made Zion's G.o.d like the G.o.ds of the heathen, and her people must see that even when they have given her up Jehovah can hold her for Himself, though in holding He tear and wound (x.x.xi. 4). The Temple is greater than the gold of the Temple; let even the latter be stripped off and sold to the heathen if it can purchase the integrity of the former.

So Jerusalem remained inviolate; she was still _the virgin, the daughter of Zion_.

[60] Schrader, _Cuneiform Inscriptions_, _O.T._, i., p. 286.

[61] 2 Kings xviii. 13-16. Here closes a paragraph. Ver. 17 begins to describe what Sennacherib did, in spite of Hezekiah's submission. He had withdrawn the army that had invested Jerusalem, for Hezekiah purchased its withdrawal by the tribute he sent. But Sennacherib, in spite of this, sent another corps of war against Jerusalem, which second attack is described in ver. 17 and onwards.

And now upon the redeemed city Isaiah could proceed to rebuild the shattered faith and morals of her people. He could say to them, "Everything has turned out as, by the word of the Lord, I said it should. The a.s.syrian has come down; Egypt has failed you. Your politicians, with their scorn of religion and their confidence in their cleverness, have deserted you. I told you that your numberless sacrifices and pomp of unreal religion would avail you nothing in your day of disaster, and lo! when this came, your religion collapsed. Your abounding wickedness, I said, could only close in your ruin and desertion by G.o.d. But one promise I kept steadfast: that Jerusalem would not fall; and to your penitence, whenever it should be real, I a.s.sured forgiveness. Jerusalem stands to-day, according to my word; and I repeat my gospel. History has vindicated my word, but _Come now, 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_. I call upon you to build again on your redeemed city, and by the grace of this pardon, the fallen ruins of your life."

Some such sermon--if indeed not actually part of chap. i.--we must conceive Isaiah to have delivered to the people when Hezekiah had bought off Sennacherib, for we find the state of Jerusalem suddenly altered.

Instead of the panic, which imagined the daily capture of the city, and rushed in hectic holiday to the housetops, crying, _Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die_, we see the citizens back upon the walls, trembling yet trusting. Instead of sweeping past Isaiah in their revelry and leaving him to feel that after forty years of travail he had lost all his influence with them, we see them gathering round about him as their single hope and confidence (x.x.xvii.). King and people look to Isaiah as their counsellor, and cannot answer the enemy without consulting him. What a change from the days of the Egyptian alliance, emba.s.sies sent off against his remonstrance, and intrigues developed without his knowledge; when Ahaz insulted him, and the drunken magnates mimicked him, and, in order to rouse an indolent people, he had to walk about the streets of Jerusalem for three years, stripped like a captive!

Truly this was the day of Isaiah's triumph, when G.o.d by events vindicated his prophecy, and all the people acknowledged his leadership.

It was the hour of the prophet's triumph, but the nation had as yet only trials before it. G.o.d has not done with nations or men when He has forgiven them. This people, whom of His grace, and in spite of themselves, G.o.d had saved from destruction, stood on the brink of another trial. G.o.d had given them a new lease of life, but it was immediately to pa.s.s through the furnace. They had bought off Sennacherib, but Sennacherib came back.

When Sennacherib got the tribute, he repented of the treaty he had made with Hezekiah. He may have felt that it was a mistake to leave in his rear so powerful a fortress, while he had still to complete the overthrow of the Egyptians. So, in spite of the tribute, he sent a force back to Jerusalem to demand her surrender. We can imagine the moral effect upon King Hezekiah and his people. It was enough to sting the most demoralised into courage. Sennacherib had doubtless expected so pliant a king and so crushed a people to yield at once. But we may confidently picture the joy of Isaiah, as he felt the return of the a.s.syrians to be the very thing required to restore spirit to his demoralised countrymen. Here was a foe, whom they could face with a sense of justice, and not, as they had met him before, in carnal confidence and the pride of their own cleverness. Now was to be a war not, like former wars, undertaken merely for party glory, but with the purest feelings of patriotism and the firmest sanctions of religion, a campaign to be entered upon, not with Pharaoh's support and the strength of Egyptian chariots, but with G.o.d Himself as an ally--of which it could be said to Judah, _Thy righteousness shall go before thee, and the glory of the Lord shall be thy rereward_.

On what free, exultant wings the spirit of Isaiah must have risen to the sublime occasion! We know him as by nature an ardent patriot and pa.s.sionate lover of his city, but through circ.u.mstance her pitiless critic and unsparing judge. In all the literature of patriotism there are no finer odes and orations than those which it owes to him; from no lips came stronger songs of war, and no heart rejoiced more in the valour that turns the battle from the gate. But till now Isaiah's patriotism had been chiefly a conscience of his country's sins, his pa.s.sionate love for Jerusalem repressed by as stern a loyalty to righteousness, and all his eloquence and courage spent in holding his people from war and persuading them _to returning and rest_. At last this conflict is at an end. The stubbornness of Judah, which has divided like some rock the current of her prophet's energies, and forced it back writhing and eddying upon itself, is removed. Isaiah's faith and his patriotism run free with the force of twin-tides in one channel, and we hear the fulness of their roar as they leap together upon the enemies of G.o.d and the fatherland. _Woe to thee, thou spoiler, and thou wast not spoiled, thou treacherous dealer, and they did not deal treacherously with thee! Whenever thou ceasest to spoil, thou shall be spoiled; and whenever thou hast made an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee. O Jehovah, be gracious unto us; for Thee have we waited: be Thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble. From the noise of a surging the peoples have fled; from the lifting up of Thyself the nations are scattered. And gathered is your spoil, the gathering of the caterpillar; like the leaping of locusts, they are leaping upon it. Exalted is Jehovah; yea, He dwelleth on high: He hath filled Zion with justice and righteousness. And there shall be stability of thy times, wealth of salvation, wisdom and knowledge; the fear of Jehovah, it shall be his treasure_ (x.x.xiii. 1-6).

Thus, then, do we propose to bridge the gulf which lies between chaps.

i. and xxii. on the one hand and chap. x.x.xiii. on the other. If they are all to be dated from the year 701, some such bridge is necessary. And the one we have traced is both morally sufficient and in harmony with what we know to have been the course of events.

What do we learn from it all? We learn a great deal upon that truth which chap. x.x.xiii. closes by announcing--the truth of Divine forgiveness.

The forgiveness of G.o.d is the foundation of every bridge from a hopeless past to a courageous present. That G.o.d can make the past be for guilt as though it had not been is always to Isaiah the a.s.surance of the future.

An old Greek miniature[62] represents him with Night behind him, veiled and sullen and holding a reversed torch. But before him stands Dawn and Innocence, a little child, with bright face and forward step and torch erect and burning. From above a hand pours light upon the face of the prophet, turned upwards. It is the message of a Divine pardon. Never did prophet more wearily feel the moral continuity of the generations, the lingering and ineradicable effects of crime. Only faith in a pardoning G.o.d could have enabled him, with such conviction of the inseparableness of yesterday and to-morrow, to make divorce between them, and turning his back on the past, as this miniature represents, hail the future as Immanuel, a child of infinite promise. From exposing and scourging the past, from proving it corrupt and pregnant with poison for all the future, Isaiah will turn on a single verse, and give us a future without war, sorrow or fraud. His pivot is ever the pardon of G.o.d. But nowhere is his faith in this so powerful, his turning upon it so swift, as at this period of Jerusalem's collapse, when, having sentenced the people to death for their iniquity--_It was revealed in mine ears by Jehovah of hosts, Surely this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord, Jehovah of hosts_ (xxii. 14)--he swings round on his promise of a little before--_Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow_--and to the people's penitence p.r.o.nounces in the last verse of chap. x.x.xiii. a final absolution: _The inhabitant shall not say, I am sick; the people that dwell therein are forgiven their iniquity_. If chap. x.x.xiii. be, as many think, Isaiah's latest oracle, then we have the literal crown of all his prophesying in these two words: _forgiven iniquity_. It is as he put it early that same year: _Come now and let us bring our reasoning to a close; though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool_. If man is to have a future, this must be the conclusion of all his past.

[62] Didron _Christian Iconography_, fig. 52.

But the absoluteness of G.o.d's pardon, making the past as though it had not been, is not the only lesson which the spiritual experience of Jerusalem in that awful year of 701 has for us. Isaiah's gospel of forgiveness is nothing less than this: that when G.o.d gives pardon He gives Himself. The name of the blessed future, which is entered through pardon--as in that miniature, a child--is Immanuel: _G.o.d-with-us_. And if it be correct that we owe the forty-sixth Psalm to these months when the a.s.syrian came back upon Jerusalem, then we see how the city, that had abandoned G.o.d, is yet able to sing when she is pardoned, _G.o.d is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in the midst of troubles_.

And this gospel of forgiveness is not only Isaiah's. According to the whole Bible, there is but one thing which separates man from G.o.d--that is sin, and when sin is done away with, G.o.d cannot be kept from man. In giving pardon to man, G.o.d gives back to man Himself. How gloriously evident this truth becomes in the New Testament! Christ, who is set before us as the Lamb of G.o.d, who beareth the sins of the world, is also Immanuel--G.o.d-with-us. The Sacrament, which most plainly seals to the believer the value of the One Sacrifice for sin, is the Sacrament in which the believer feeds upon Christ and appropriates Him. The sinner, who comes to Christ, not only receives pardon for Christ's sake, but receives Christ. Forgiveness means nothing less than this: that in giving pardon G.o.d gives Himself.