Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 23

CHAPTER XXVIII.

_THE EFFECT OF SIN ON OUR MATERIAL CIRc.u.mSTANCE._

ISAIAH xxiv. (DATE UNCERTAIN).

The twenty-fourth of Isaiah is one of those chapters, which almost convince the most persevering reader of Scripture that a consecutive reading of the Authorized Version is an impossibility. For what does he get from it but a weary and unintelligent impression of destruction, from which he gladly escapes to the nearest clear utterance of gospel or judgement? Criticism affords little help. It cannot clearly identify the chapter with any historical situation. For a moment there is a gleam of a company standing outside the convulsion, and to the west of the prophet, while the prophet himself suffers captivity.[80] But even this fades before we make it out; and all the rest of the chapter has too universal an application--the language is too imaginative, enigmatic and even paradoxical--to be applied to an actual historical situation, or to its development in the immediate future. This is an ideal description, the apocalyptic vision of a last, great day of judgement upon the whole world; and perhaps the moral truths are all the more impressive that the reader is not distracted by temporary or local references.

[80] vv. 14-16, which are very perplexing. In 14 a company is introduced to us very vaguely as _those_ or _yonder ones_, who are represented as seeing the bright side of the convulsion which is the subject of the chapter. _They cry aloud from the sea_; that is, _from the west_ of the prophet. He is therefore in the east, and in captivity, in the centre of the convulsion. The problem is to find any actual historical situation, in which part of Israel was in the east in captivity, and part in the west free and full of reasons for praising G.o.d for the calamity, out of which their brethren saw no escape for themselves.

With the very first verse the prophecy leaps far beyond all particular or national conditions: _Behold, Jehovah shall be emptying the earth and rifling it; and He shall turn it upside down and scatter its inhabitants_. This is expressive and thorough; the words are those which were used for cleaning a dirty dish. To the completeness of this opening verse there is really nothing in the chapter to add. All the rest of the verses only ill.u.s.trate this upturning and scouring of the material universe. For it is with the material universe that the chapter is concerned. Nothing is said of the spiritual nature of man--little, indeed, about man at all. He is simply called _the inhabitant of the earth_, and the structure of society (ver. 2) is introduced only to make more complete the effect of the convulsion of the earth itself. Man cannot escape those judgements which shatter his material habitation. It is like one of Dante's visions. _Terror, and Pit and Snare upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth! And it shall come to pa.s.s that he who fleeth from the noise of the Terror shall fall into the Pit, and he who cometh up out of the midst of the Pit shall be taken in the Snare. For the windows on high are opened, and the foundations of the earth do shake.

Broken, utterly broken, is the earth; shattered, utterly shattered, the earth; staggering, very staggering, the earth; reeling, the earth reeleth like a drunken man: she swingeth to and fro like a hammock._ And so through the rest of the chapter it is the material life of man that is cursed: _the new wine_, _the vine_, _the tabrets_, _the harp_, _the song_, and the merriness in men's hearts which these call forth. Nor does the chapter confine itself to the earth. The closing verses carry the effect of judgement to the heavens and far limits of the material universe. _The host of the high ones on high_ (ver. 21) are not spiritual beings, the angels. They are material bodies, the stars.

_Then, too, shall the moon be confounded, and the stars ashamed_, when the Lord's kingdom is established and His righteousness made gloriously clear.

What awful truth is this for ill.u.s.tration of which we see not man, but his habitation, the world and all its surroundings, lifted up by the hand of the Lord, broken open, wiped out and shaken, while man himself, as if only to heighten the effect, staggers hopelessly like some broken insect on the quaking ruins? What judgement is this, in which not only one city or one kingdom is concerned, as in the last prophecy of which we treated, but the whole earth is convulsed, and moon and sun confounded?

The judgement is the visitation of man's sins on his material surroundings--_The earth's transgression shall be heavy upon it; and it shall rise, and not fall_. The truth on which this judgement rests is that between man and his material circ.u.mstance--the earth he inhabits, the seasons which bear him company through time and the stars to which he looks high up in heaven--there is a moral sympathy. _The earth also is profaned under the inhabitants thereof, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant._

The Bible gives no support to the theory that matter itself is evil. G.o.d created all things; _and G.o.d saw everything that He had made; and, behold, it was very good_. When, therefore, we read in the Bible that the earth is cursed, we read that it is cursed for man's sake; when we read of its desolation, it is as the effect of man's crime. The Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues of Egypt and other great physical catastrophes happened because men were stubborn or men were foul. We cannot help noticing, however, that matter was thus convulsed or destroyed, not only for the purpose of punishing the moral agent, but because of some poison which had pa.s.sed from him into the unconscious instruments, stage and circ.u.mstance of his crime. According to the Bible, there would appear to be some mysterious sympathy between man and Nature. Man not only governs Nature; he infects and informs her.

As the moral life of the soul expresses itself in the physical life of the body for the latter's health or corruption, so the conduct of the human race affects the physical life of the universe to its farthest limits in s.p.a.ce. When man is reconciled to G.o.d, the wilderness blossoms like a rose; but the guilt of man sullies, infects and corrupts the place he inhabits and the articles he employs; and their destruction becomes necessary, not for his punishment so much as because of the infection and pollution that is in them.

The Old Testament is not contented with a general statement of this great principle, but pursues it to all sorts of particular and private applications. The curses of the Lord fell, not only on the sinner, but on his dwelling, on his property and even on the bit of ground these occupied. This was especially the case with regard to idolatry. When Israel put a pagan population to the sword, they were commanded to raze the city, gather its wealth together, burn all that was burnable and put the rest into the temple of the Lord as a thing _devoted_ or _accursed_, which it would harm themselves to share (Deut. vii. 25, 26; xiii. 7). The very site of Jericho was cursed, and men were forbidden to build upon its horrid waste. The story of Achan ill.u.s.trates the same principle.

It is just this principle which chap. xxiv. extends to the whole universe. What happened in Jericho because of its inhabitants' idolatry is now to happen to the whole earth because of man's sin. _The earth also is profane under her inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant._ In these words the prophet takes us away back to the covenant with Noah, which he properly emphasizes as a covenant with all mankind. With a n.o.ble universalism, for which his race and their literature get too little credit, this Hebrew recognises that once all mankind were holy unto G.o.d, who had included them under His grace, that promised the fixedness and fertility of nature. But that covenant, though of grace, had its conditions for man. These had been broken. The race had grown wicked, as it was before the Flood; and therefore, in terms which vividly recall that former judgement of G.o.d--_the windows on high are opened_--the prophet foretells a new and more awful catastrophe. One word which he employs betrays how close he feels the moral sympathy to be between man and his world. _The earth_, he says, _is profane_. This is a word, whose root meaning is _that which has fallen away_ or _separated itself_, which is _delinquent_. Sometimes, perhaps, it has a purely moral significance, like our word "abandoned" in the common acceptance: he who has fallen far and utterly into sin, _the reckless sinner_. But mostly it has rather the religious meaning of one who has fallen out of the covenant relation with G.o.d and the relevant benefits and privileges. Into this covenant not only Israel and their land, but humanity and the whole world, have been brought. Is man under covenant grace? The world is also. Does man fall? So does the world, becoming with him _profane_. The consequence of breaking the covenant oath was expressed in Hebrew by a technical word; and it is this word which, translated _curse_, is applied in ver. 6 to the earth.

The whole earth is to be broken up and dissolved. What then is to become of the people of G.o.d--the indestructible remnant? Where are they to settle? In this new deluge is there a new ark? For answer the prophet presents us with an old paradise (ver. 23). He has wrecked the universe; but he says now, _Jehovah of hosts shall dwell in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem_. It would be impossible to find a better instance of the limitations of Old Testament prophecy than this return to the old dispensation after the old dispensation has been committed to the flames. At such a crisis as the conflagration of the universe for the sin of man, the hope of the New Testament looks for the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, but there is no scintilla of such a hope in this prediction. The imagination of the Hebrew seer is beaten back upon the theatre his conscience has abandoned. He knows "the old is out of date," but for him "the new is not yet born;" and, therefore, convinced as he is that the old must pa.s.s away, he is forced to borrow from its ruins a provisional abode for G.o.d's people, a figure for the truth which grips him so firmly, that, in spite of the death of all the universe for man's sin, there must be a visibleness and locality of the Divine majesty, a place where the people of G.o.d may gather to bless His holy name.

In this contrast of the power of spiritual imagination possessed respectively by the Old and New Testaments we must not, however, lose the ethical interest which the main lesson of this chapter has for the individual conscience. A breaking universe, the great day of judgement, may be too large and too far off to impress our conscience. But each of us has his own world--body, property and environment--which is as much and as evidently affected by his own sins as our chapter represents the universe to be by the sins of the race.

To grant that the moral and physical universes are from the same hand is to affirm a sympathy and mutual reaction between them. This affirmation is confirmed by experience, and this experience is of two kinds. To the guilty man Nature seems aware, and flashes back from her larger surfaces the magnified reflection of his own self-contempt and terror. But, besides, men are also unable to escape attributing to the material instruments or surroundings of their sin a certain infection, a certain power of recommunicating to their imaginations and memories the desire for sin, as well as of inflicting upon them the pain and penalty of the disorder it has produced among themselves. Sin, though born, as Christ said, in the heart, has immediately a material expression; and we may follow this outwards through man's mind, body and estate, not only to find it "hindering, disturbing, complicating all," but reinfecting with the l.u.s.t and odour of sin the will which gave it birth. As sin is put forth by the will, or is cherished in the heart, so we find error cloud the mind, impurity the imagination, misery the feelings, and pain and weariness infect the flesh and bone. G.o.d, who modelled it, alone knows how far man's physical form has been degraded by the sinful thoughts and habits of which for ages it has been the tool and expression; but even our eyes may sometimes trace the despoiler, and that not only in the case of what are preferably named sins of the flesh, but even with l.u.s.ts that do not require for their gratification the abuse of the body.

Pride, as one might think the least fleshly of all the vices, leaves yet in time her d.a.m.ning signature, and will mark the strongest faces with the sad symptoms of that mental break-down, for which unrestrained pride is so often to blame. If sin thus disfigures the body, we know that sin also infects the body. The habituated flesh becomes the suggester of crime to the will which first constrained it to sin, and now wearily, but in vain, rebels against the habits of its instrument. But we recall all this about the body only to say that what is true of the body is true of the soul's greater material surroundings. With the sentence _Thou shalt surely die_, G.o.d connects this other: _Cursed is the ground for thy sake_.

When we pa.s.s from a man's body, the wrapping we find next nearest to his soul is his property. It has always been an instinct of the race, that there is nothing a man may so infect with the sin of his heart as his handiwork and the gains of his toil. And that is a true instinct, for, in the first place, the making of property perpetuates a man's own habits. If he is successful in business, then every bit of wealth he gathers is a confirmation of the motives and tempers in which he conducted his business. A man deceives himself as to this, saying, Wait till I have made enough; then I will put away the meanness, the harshness and the dishonesty with which I made it. He shall not be able.

Just because he has been successful, he will continue in his habit without thinking; just because there has been no break-down to convict of folly and suggest penitence, so he becomes hardened. Property is a bridge on which our pa.s.sions cross from one part of our life to another.

The Germans have an ironical proverb: "The man who has stolen a hundred thousand dollars _can afford_ to live honestly." The emphasis of the irony falls on the words in italics: he can afford, but never does. His property hardens his heart, and keeps him from repentance.

But the instinct of humanity has also been quick to this: that the curse of ill-gotten wealth pa.s.ses like bad blood from father to child. What is the truth in this matter? A glance at history will tell us. The acc.u.mulation of property is the result of certain customs, habits and laws. In its own powerful interest property perpetuates these down the ages, and infects the fresh air of each new generation with their temper. How often in the history of mankind has it been property gained under unjust laws or cruel monopolies which has prevented the abolition of these, and carried into gentler, freer times the pride and exclusiveness of the age, by whose rude habits it was gathered. This moral transference, which we see on so large a scale in public history, is repeated to some extent in every private bequest. A curse does not necessarily follow an estate from the sinful producer of it to his heir; but the latter is, _by the bequest itself_ generally brought into so close a contact with his predecessor as to share his conscience and be in sympathy with his temper. And the case is common where an heir, though absolutely up to the date of his succession separate from him who made and has left the property, nevertheless finds himself unable to alter the methods, or to escape the temper, in which the property has been managed. In nine cases out of ten property carries conscience and transfers habit; if the guilt does not descend, the infection does.

When we pa.s.s from the effect of sin upon property to its effect upon circ.u.mstance, we pa.s.s to what we can affirm with even greater conscience. Man has the power of permanently soaking and staining his surroundings with the effect of sins in themselves momentary and transient. Sin increases terribly by the mental law of a.s.sociation. It is not the gin-shop and the face of wanton beauty that alone tempt men to sin. Far more subtle seductions are about every one of us. That we have the power of inflicting our character upon the scenes of our conduct is proved by some of the dreariest experiences of life. A failure in duty renders the place of it distasteful and enervating. Are we irritable and selfish at home? Then home is certain to be depressing, and little helpful to our spiritual growth. Are we selfish and n.i.g.g.ardly in the interest we take in others? Then the congregation we go to, the suburb we dwell in, will appear insipid and unprofitable; we shall be past the possibility of gaining character or happiness from the ground where G.o.d planted us and meant us to grow. Students have been idle in their studies till every time they enter them a reflex languor comes down like stale smoke, and the room they desecrated takes its revenge on them. We have it in our power to make our workshops, our laboratories and our studies places of magnificent inspiration, to enter which is to receive a baptism of industry and hope; and we have power to make it impossible ever to work in them again at full pitch. The pulpit, the pew, the very communion-table, come under this law. If a minister of G.o.d have made up his mind to say nothing from his accustomed place, which has not cost him toil, to feel nothing but a dependence on G.o.d and a desire for souls, then he will never set foot there but the power of the Lord shall be upon him. But there are men who would rather set foot anywhere than in their pulpit--men who out of it are full of fellowship, information, and infective health, but there they are paralysed with the curse of their idle past. How history shows us that the most sacred shelters and inst.i.tutions of man become tainted with sin, and are destroyed in revolution or abandoned to decay by the intolerant conscience of younger generations! How the hidden life of each man feels his past sins possessing his home and hearth, his pew, and even his place at the Sacrament, till it is sometimes better for his soul's health to avoid these!

Such considerations give a great moral force to the doctrine of the Old Testament that man's sin has rendered necessary the destruction of his material circ.u.mstances, and that the Divine judgement includes a broken and a rifled universe.

The New Testament has borrowed this vision from the Old, but added, as we have seen, with greater distinctness, the hope of new heavens and a new earth. We have not concluded the subject, however, when we have pointed this out, for the New Testament has another gospel. The grace of G.o.d affects even the material results of sin; the Divine pardon that converts the sinner converts his circ.u.mstance also; Christ Jesus sanctifies even the flesh, and is the Physician of the body as well as the Saviour of the soul. To Him physical evil abounds only that He may show forth His glory in curing it. _Neither did this man sin nor his parents, but that the works of G.o.d should be made manifest in him._ To Paul the _whole creation groaneth and travaileth with_ the sinner _till now_, the hour of the sinner's redemption. The Gospel bestows an evangelic liberty which permits the strong Christian to partake of meats offered to idols. And, finally, _all things work together for good to them that love G.o.d_, for although to the converted and forgiven sinner the material pains which his sins have brought on him may continue into his new life, they are experienced by him no more as the just penalties of an angry G.o.d, but as the loving, sanctifying chastis.e.m.e.nts of his Father in heaven.

CHAPTER XXIX.

_G.o.d'S POOR._

ISAIAH xxv.-xxvii. (DATE UNCERTAIN).

We have seen that no more than the faintest gleam of historical reflection brightens the obscurity of chap. xxiv., and that the disaster which lowers there is upon too world-wide a scale to be forced within the conditions of any single period in the fortunes of Israel. In chaps.

xxv.-xxvii., which may naturally be held to be a continuation of chap.

xxiv., the historical allusions are more numerous. Indeed, it might be said they are too numerous, for they contradict one another to the perplexity of the most acute critics. They imply historical circ.u.mstances for the prophecy both before and after the exile. On the one hand, the blame of idolatry in Judah (xxvii. 9), the mention of a.s.syria and Egypt (xxvii. 12, 13), and the absence of the name of Babylon are indicative of a pre-exilic date.[81] Arguments from style are always precarious; but it is striking that some critics, who deny that chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. can have come as a whole from Isaiah's time, profess to see his hand in certain pa.s.sages.[82] Then, secondly, through these verses which point to a pre-exilic date there are woven, almost inextricably, phrases of actual exile: expressions of the sense of living on a level and in contact with the heathen (xxvi. 9, 10); a request to G.o.d's people to withdraw from the midst of a heathen public to the privacy of their chambers (20, 21); prayers and promises of deliverance from the oppressor (_pa.s.sim_); hopes of the establishment of Zion, and of the repopulation of the Holy Land. And, thirdly, some verses imply that the speaker has already returned to Zion itself: he says more than once, _in this mountain_; there are hymns celebrating a deliverance actually achieved, as--G.o.d _has done a marvel. For Thou hast made a citadel into a heap, a fortified city into a ruin, a castle of strangers to be no city, not to be built again._ Such phrases do not read as if the prophet were creating for the lips of his people a psalm of triumph against a far future deliverance; they have in them the ring of what has already happened.

[81] The mention of Moab (xxv. 10, 11) is also consistent with a pre-exilic date, but does not necessarily imply it.

[82] _E.g._, xxv. 6-8, 10, 11; xxvii. 10, 11, 9, 12, 13.

This bare statement of the allusions of the prophecy will give the ordinary reader some idea of the difficulties of Biblical criticism.

What is to be made of a prophecy uttering the catch-words and breathing the experience of three distinct periods? One solution of the difficulty may be that we have here the composition of a Jew already returned from exile to a desecrated sanctuary and depopulated land, who has woven through his original utterances of complaint and hope the experience of earlier oppressions and deliverances, using even the names of earlier tyrants. In his immediate past a great city that oppressed the Jews has fallen, though, if this is Babylon, it is strange that he nowhere names it. But his intention is rather religious than historical; he seeks to give a general representation of the att.i.tude of the world to the people of G.o.d, and of the judgement which G.o.d brings on the world. This view of the composition is supported by either of two possible interpretations of that difficult verse xxvii. 1: _In that day Jehovah with His sword, the hard and the great and the strong, shall perform visitation upon Leviathan, Serpent Elusive, and upon Leviathan, Serpent Tortuous; and He shall slay the Dragon that is in the sea._ Cheyne treats these monsters as mythic personifications of the clouds, the darkness and the powers of the air, so that the verse means that, just as Jehovah is supreme in the physical world, He shall be in the moral.

But it is more probable that the two Leviathans mean a.s.syria and Babylon--the _Elusive_ one, a.s.syria on the swift-shooting Tigris; the _Tortuous_ one, Babylon on the winding Euphrates--while _the Dragon that is in the sea_ or _the west_ is Egypt. But if the prophet speaks of a victory over Israel's three great enemies all at once, that means that he is talking universally or ideally; and this impression is further heightened by the mythic names he gives them. Such arguments, along with the undoubted post-exilic fragments in the prophecy, point to a late date, so that even a very conservative critic, who is satisfied that Isaiah is the author, admits that "the _possibility_ of exilic authorship does not allow itself to be denied."

If this character which we attribute to the prophecy be correct--viz., that it is a summary or ideal account of the att.i.tude of the alien world to Israel, and of the judgement G.o.d has ready for the world--then, though itself be exilic, its place in the Book of Isaiah is intelligible. Chaps. xxiv.-xxvii. fitly crown the long list of Isaiah's oracles upon the foreign nations; they finally formulate the purposes of G.o.d towards the nations and towards Israel, whom the nations have oppressed. Our opinions must not be final or dogmatic about this matter of authorship; the obscurities are not nearly cleared up. But if it be ultimately found certain that this prophecy, which lies in the heart of the Book of Isaiah, is not by Isaiah himself, that need neither startle nor unsettle us. No doctrinal question is stirred by such a discovery, not even that of the accuracy of the Scriptures. For that a book is ent.i.tled by Isaiah's name does not necessarily mean that it is all by Isaiah; and we shall feel still less compelled to believe that these chapters are his when we find other chapters called by his name while these are not said to be by him. In truth there is a difficulty here, only because it is supposed that a book ent.i.tled by Isaiah's name must necessarily contain nothing but what is Isaiah's own. Tradition may have come to say so; but the Scripture itself, bearing as it does unmistakable marks of another age than Isaiah's, tells us that tradition is wrong: and the testimony of Scripture is surely to be preferred, especially when it betrays, as we have seen, sufficient reasons why a prophecy, though not Isaiah's, was attached to his genuine and undoubted oracles. In any case, however, as even the conservative critic whom we have quoted admits, "for the religious value" of the prophecy "the question" of the authorship "is thoroughly irrelevant."

We shall perceive this at once as we now turn to see what is the religious value of our prophecy. Chaps. xxv.-xxvii. stand in the front rank of evangelical prophecy. In their experience of religion, their characterisations of G.o.d's people, their expressions of faith, their missionary hopes and hopes of immortality, they are very rich and edifying. Perhaps their most signal feature is their designation of the people of G.o.d. In this collection of prayers and hymns the people of G.o.d are not regarded as a political body. They are only once called the _nation_ and spoken of in connection with a territory (xxvi. 15). Only twice are they named with the national names of Israel and Jacob (xxvii.

6, 9, 12). We miss Isaiah's promised king, his pictures of righteous government, his emphasis upon social justice and purity, his interest in the foreign politics of his State, his hopes of national grandeur and agricultural felicity. In these chapters G.o.d's people are described by adjectives signifying spiritual qualities. Their nationality is no more pleaded, only their suffering estate and their hunger and thirst after G.o.d. The ideals that are presented for the future are neither political nor social, but ecclesiastical. We saw how closely Isaiah's prophesying was connected with the history of his time. The people of this prophecy seem to have done with history, and to be interested only in worship.

And along with the a.s.surance of the continued establishment of Zion as the centre for a secure and holy people, filling a secure and fertile land,--with which, as we have seen, the undoubted visions of Isaiah content themselves, while silent as to the fate of the individuals who drop from this future through death,--we have the most abrupt and thrilling hopes expressed for the resurrection of these latter to share in the glory of the redeemed and restored community.

Among the names applied to G.o.d's people there are three which were destined to play an enormous part in the history of religion. In the English version these appear as two: _poor and needy_; but in the original they are three. In chap. xxv. 4: _Thou hast been a stronghold to the poor and a stronghold to the needy, poor_ renders a Hebrew word, "d[=a]l," literally _wavering_, _tottering_, _infirm_, then _slender_ or _lean_, then _poor_ in fortune and estate; _needy_ literally renders the Hebrew "'ebhyon," Latin _egenus_. In chap. xxvi. 6: _the foot of the poor and the steps of the needy, needy_ renders "d[=a]l," while _poor_ renders "'[=a]ni," a pa.s.sive form--_forced_, _afflicted_, _oppressed_, then _wretched_, whether under persecution, poverty, loneliness or exile, and so _tamed_, _mild_, _meek_. These three words, in their root ideas of _infirmity_, _need_ and positive _affliction_, cover among them every aspect of physical poverty and distress. Let us see how they came also to be the expression of the highest moral and evangelical virtues.

If there is one thing which distinguishes the people of the revelation from other historical nations, it is the evidence afforded by their dictionaries of the power to trans.m.u.te the most afflicting experiences of life into virtuous disposition and effectual desire for G.o.d. We see this most clearly if we contrast the Hebrews' use of their words for _poor_ with that of the first language which was employed to translate these words--the Greek in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.

In the Greek temper there was a n.o.ble pity for the unfortunate; the earliest Greeks regarded beggars as the peculiar proteges of Heaven.

Greek philosophy developed a capacity for enriching the soul in misfortune; Stoicism gave imperishable proof of how bravely a man could hold poverty and pain to be things indifferent, and how much gain from such indifference he could bring to his soul. But in the vulgar opinion of Greece penury and sickness were always disgraceful; and Greek dictionaries mark the degradation of terms, which at first merely noted physical disadvantage, into epithets of contempt or hopelessness. It is very striking that it was not till they were employed to translate the Old Testament ideas of poverty that the Greek words for "poor" and "lowly" came to bear an honourable significance. And in the case of the Stoic, who endured poverty or pain with such indifference, was it not just this indifference that prevented him from discovering in his tribulations the rich evangelical experience which, as we shall see, fell to the quick conscience and sensitive nerves of the Hebrew?

Let us see how this conscience was developed. In the East poverty scarcely ever means physical disadvantage alone: in its train there follow higher disabilities. A poor Eastern cannot be certain of fair play in the courts of the land. He is very often a wronged man, with a fire of righteous anger burning in his breast. Again, and more important, misfortune is to the quick religious instinct of the Oriental a sign of G.o.d's estrangement. With us misfortune is so often only the cruelty, sometimes real sometimes imagined, of the rich; the unemployed vents his wrath at the capitalist, the tramp shakes his fist after the carriage on the highway. In the East they do not forget to curse the rich, but they remember as well to humble themselves beneath the hand of G.o.d. With an unfortunate Oriental the conviction is supreme, G.o.d is angry with me; I have lost His favour. His soul eagerly longs for G.o.d.

A poor man in the East has, therefore, not only a hunger for food: he has the hotter hunger for justice, the deeper hunger for G.o.d. Poverty in itself, without extraneous teaching, develops n.o.bler appet.i.tes. The physical, becomes the moral, pauper; poor in substance, he grows poor in spirit. It was by developing, with the aid of G.o.d's Spirit, this quick conscience and this deep desire for G.o.d, which in the East are the very soul of physical poverty, that the Jews advanced to that sense of evangelical poverty of heart, blessed by Jesus in the first of His Beat.i.tudes as the possession of the kingdom of heaven.

Till the Exile, however, the poor were only a portion of the people. In the Exile the whole nation became poor, and henceforth "G.o.d's poor"

might become synonymous with "G.o.d's people." This was the time when the words received their spiritual baptism. Israel felt the physical curse of poverty to its extreme of famine. The pains, privations and terrors, which the glib tongues of our comfortable middle cla.s.ses, as they sing the psalms of Israel, roll off so easily for symbols of their own spiritual experience, were felt by the captive Hebrews in all their concrete physical effects. The n.o.ble and the saintly, the gentle and the cultured, priest, soldier and citizen, woman, youth and child, were torn from home and estate, were deprived of civil standing, were imprisoned, fettered, flogged and starved to death. We learn something of what it must have been from the words which Jeremiah addressed to Baruch, a youth of good family and fine culture: _Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not, for, behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith the LORD; only thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest._ Imagine a whole nation plunged into poverty of this degree--not born into it having known no better things, nor stunted into it with sensibility and the power of expression sapped out of them, but plunged into it, with the unimpaired culture, conscience and memories of the flower of the people. When G.o.d's own hand sent fresh from Himself a poet's soul into "the clay biggin'" of an Ayrshire ploughman, what a revelation we received of the distress, the discipline and the graces of poverty! But in the Jewish nation as it pa.s.sed into exile there were a score of hearts with as unimpaired an appet.i.te for life as Robert Burns; and, worse than he, they went to feel its pangs away from home. Genius, conscience and pride drank to the dregs in a foreign land the bitter cup of the poor. The Psalms and Lamentations show us how they bore their poison. A Greek Stoic might sneer at the complaint and sobbing, the self-abas.e.m.e.nt so strangely mixed with fierce cries for vengeance. But the Jew had within him the conscience that will not allow a man to be a Stoic. He never forgot that it was for his sin he suffered, and therefore to him suffering could not be a thing indifferent. With this, his native hunger for justice reached in captivity a famine pitch; his sense of guilt was equalled by as sincere an indignation at the tyrant who held him in his brutal grasp. The feeling of estrangement from G.o.d increased to a degree that only the exile of a Jew could excite: the longing for G.o.d's house and the worship lawful only there; the longing for the relief which only the sacrifices of the Temple could bestow; the longing for G.o.d's own presence and the light of His face. _My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh longeth after Thee, in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is, as I have looked upon Thee in the sanctuary, to see Thy power and Thy glory. For Thy lovingkindness is better than life!_

_Thy lovingkindness is better than life!_--is the secret of it all.

There is that which excites a deeper hunger in the soul than the hunger for life, and for the food and money that give life. This spiritual poverty is most richly bred in physical penury, it is strong enough to displace what feeds it. The physical poverty of Israel which had awakened these other hungers of the soul--hunger for forgiveness, hunger for justice, hunger for G.o.d--was absorbed by them; and when Israel came out of exile, _to be poor_ meant, not so much to be indigent in this world's substance as to feel the need of pardon, the absence of righteousness, the want of G.o.d.

It is at this time, as we have seen, that Isa. xxiv.-xxvii. was written; and it is in the temper of this time that the three Hebrew words for "poor" and "needy" are used in chaps. xxv. and xxvi. The returned exiles were still politically dependent and abjectly poor. Their discipline therefore continued, and did not allow them to forget their new lessons.

In fact, they developed the results of these further, till in this prophecy we find no fewer than five different aspects of spiritual poverty.

1. We have already seen how strong the sense of sin is in chap. xxiv.

This POVERTY of PEACE is not so fully expressed in the following chapters, and indeed seems crowded out by the sense of the _iniquity of the inhabitants of the earth_ and the desire for their judgement (xxvi.

21).

2. The feeling of the POVERTY of JUSTICE is very strong in this prophecy. But it is to be satisfied; in part it has been satisfied (xxv.

1-4). _A strong city_, probably Babylon, has fallen. _Moab shall be trodden down in his place, even as straw is trodden down in the water of the dunghill._ The complete judgement is to come when the Lord shall destroy the two _Leviathans_ and the great _Dragon of the west_ (xxvii.

1). It is followed by the restoration of Israel to the state in which Isaiah (chap. v. 1) sang so sweetly of her. _A pleasant vineyard, sing ye of her. I, Jehovah, her Keeper, moment by moment do I water her; lest any make a raid upon her, night and day will I keep her._ The Hebrew text then reads, _Fury is not in Me_; but probably the Septuagint version has preserved the original meaning: _I have no walls_. If this be correct, then Jehovah is describing the present state of Jerusalem, the fulfilment of Isaiah's threat, chap. v. 6: _Walls I have not; let there but be briers and thorns before me! With war will I stride against them; I will burn them together._ But then there breaks the softer alternative of the reconciliation of Judah's enemies: _Or else let him seize hold of My strength; let him make peace with Me--peace let him make with Me_. In such a peace Israel shall spread, and his fulness become the riches of the Gentiles. _In that by-and-bye Jacob shall take root, Israel blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit._