PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 1 (of 2)
Smith, George Adam · 137,423 words · 190 reading sections
Xiv. Three Truths About God 238
Produced by Colin Bell, Julia Neufeld and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). Small capital text has been replaced with all ca…
273 wordsSECTION 2Introduction.
ISAIAH xxxii. 9-20. DATE UNCERTAIN. ISAIAH xiv. 24-xxi.; xxiii. VARIOUS DATES. ISAIAH xxiii. 702 B.C. ISAIAH i.; xxii. Early in 701 B.C. ISAIAH xxii.; xxxiii. LATER IN 701 B.C. ISAIAH xxxiii. ISAIAH xxxvi. 701 B.C. ISAIAH xxxvii. 701 B.C. XXIV. A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING THE DELIVERANCE OF JER…
903 wordsSECTION 3Introduction.
Of course, any chronological arrangement of Isaiah's prophecies must be largely provisional. Only some of the chapters are fixed to dates past possibility of doubt. The Assyriology which has helped us with these must yield further results before the controversies can be settled that exist with regard to the rest. I hav…
700 wordsSECTION 4Introduction.
I may state that this Exposition is based upon a close study of the Hebrew text of Isaiah, and that the translations are throughout my own, except in one or two cases where I have quoted from the revised English version. With regard to the Revised Version of Isaiah, which I have had opportunities of thoroughly testing…
395 wordsSECTION 5727 B.C.
745. Tiglath-pileser II. ascends the Assyrian Throne. 740. Uzziah dies. Jotham becomes sole King of Judah. Isaiah's Inaugural Vision (Isa. vi.). 735. Jotham dies. Ahaz succeeds. League of Syria and Northern Israel against Judah. 734-732. Syrian Campaign of Tiglath-pileser II. Siege and Capture of Damascus. Invasi…
259 wordsSECTION 6_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
ISAIAH i.--HIS GENERAL PREFACE. The first chapter of the Book of Isaiah owes its position not to its date, but to its character. It was published late in the prophet's life. The seventh verse describes the land as overrun by foreign soldiery, and such a calamity befell Judah only in the last two of the four reigns ove…
702 wordsSECTION 7_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
Over against the prophetic view of religion sprawls and reeks in this same chapter the popular--religion as smoky sacrifice, assiduous worship, and ritual. The people to whom the chapter was addressed were not idolaters.[2] Hezekiah's reformation was over. Judah worshipped her own God, whom the prophet introduces not a…
894 wordsSECTION 8_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
What is this questioning nothing holds away, nothing stills, and nothing wears out? It is the voice of God Himself, and its insistence is therefore as irresistible as its effect is universal. That is not mere rhetoric which opens the Lord's controversy: _Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth, for the Lord hath spoken_…
1,090 wordsSECTION 9_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
Isaiah's conscience, then, was perfect, because it was two-fold: _God is holy; God is practical_. If there be the glory, the purity as of fire, of His Presence to overawe, there is His unceasing inspection of us, there is His interest in the smallest details of our life, there are His fixed laws, from regard for all of…
671 wordsSECTION 10_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
But the prophet does not leave conscience alone with its personal and inward results. He rouses it to its social applications. The sins with which the Jews are charged in this charge of the Lord are public sins. The whole people is indicted, but it is the judges, princes and counsellors who are denounced. Judah's disas…
697 wordsSECTION 11_The Argument Of The Lord And Its Conclusion._
Merely intellectual scepticism, however, is not within Isaiah's horizon. He would never have employed (nor would any other prophet) our modern habits of doubt, except as he employs these intellectual terms, _to know_ and _to consider_--viz., as instruments of moral search and conviction. Had he lived now he would have …
587 wordsSECTION 12_The Three Jerusalems._
ISAIAH ii.-iv. (740-735 B.C.). After the general introduction, in chap. i., to the prophecies of Isaiah, there comes another portion of the book, of greater length, but nearly as distinct as the first. It covers four chapters, the second to the sixth, all of them dating from the same earliest period of Isaiah's minist…
652 wordsSECTION 13_The Three Jerusalems._
Isaiah had been born into the flourishing nation while Uzziah was king. The great events of that monarch's reign were his education, the still grander hopes they prompted the passion of his virgin fancy. He must have absorbed as the very temper of his youth this national consciousness which swelled so proudly in Judah …
664 wordsSECTION 14_The Three Jerusalems._
It is not with surprise, therefore, that we find the first prophecies of Isaiah directed upon his mother city: _The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem._ There is little about Judah in these chapters: the country forms but a fringe to the capital. Before we look into the subject of the …
671 wordsSECTION 15_The Three Jerusalems._
I. THE IDEALIST (ii. 1-5). All men who have shown our race how great things are possible have had their inspiration in dreaming of the impossible. Reformers, who at death were content to have lived for the moving forward but one inch of some of their fellow-men, began by believing themselves able to lift the whole wor…
754 wordsSECTION 16_The Three Jerusalems._
Attached to this general denunciation are some satiric descriptions, in the third chapter, of the anarchy, to which society in Jerusalem is fast being reduced under its childish and effeminate king. The scorn of these passages is scathing; _the eyes of the glory of God_ burn through every rank, fashion and ornament in …
697 wordsSECTION 17_The Three Jerusalems._
This was the climax of the prophet's judgement. If the salt have lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden under foot. If the women are corrupt the state is moribund. III. _The Prophet of the Lord_ (iv. 2-6). Is there, then, no hope for Jerusalem?…
876 wordsSECTION 18_The Three Jerusalems._
To put it another way: All of us who live to work for our fellow-men or who hope to lift them higher by our word begin with our own visions of a great future. These visions, though our youth lends to them an original generosity and enthusiasm, are, like Isaiah's, largely borrowed. The progressive instincts of the age i…
527 wordsSECTION 19Chapter Iii.
_THE VINEYARD OF THE LORD, OR TRUE PATRIOTISM THE CONSCIENCE OF OUR COUNTRY'S SINS._ ISAIAH v.; ix. 8-x. 4 (735 _B.C._). The prophecy contained in these chapters belongs, as we have seen, to the same early period of Isaiah's career as chapters ii.-iv., about the time when Ahaz ascended the throne after the long and s…
665 wordsSECTION 20Chapter Iii.
The chapter is a noble piece of patriotism--one of the noblest of a race who, although for the greater part of their history without a fatherland, have contributed more brilliantly than perhaps any other to the literature of patriotism, and that simply because, as Isaiah here illustrates, patriotism was to their prophe…
887 wordsSECTION 21Chapter Iii.
So, then, the patriotism of all great men has carried a conscience for their country's sins. But while this is always more or less a burden to the true patriot, there are certain periods in which his care for his country ought to be this predominantly, and need be little else. In a period like our own, for instance, of…
769 wordsSECTION 22Chapter Iii.
[4] Ewald happily suggests that verse 17 has dropped out of, and should be restored to, its proper position at the end of the first "woe," where it contributes to the development of the meaning far more than from where it stands in the text. During recent agitations in our own country one has often seen the "land l…
1,153 wordsSECTION 23Chapter Iii.
The next three Woes are upon different aggravations of that moral perversity which the prophet has already traced to strong drink. In the first of these it is better to read, _draw punishment near with cords of vanity_, than _draw iniquity_. Then we have a striking antithesis--the drunkards mocking Isaiah over their cu…
914 wordsSECTION 24Chapter Iii.
What Isaiah unfolds, then, is a series of calamities that have overtaken the people of Israel. It is impossible for us to identify every one of them with a particular event in Israel's history otherwise known to us. Some it is not difficult to recognize; but the prophet passes in a perplexing way from Judah to Ephraim …
723 wordsSECTION 25Chapter Iii.
[5] Read past tenses, as in the margin of Revised Version, for all the future tenses, or better, the historical present, down to the end of the chapter. [6] It is part of the argument for connecting ix. 8 with v. 25 that this phrase would be very natural after the earthquake described in v. 25. 3. WAR AND DEFEAT (…
718 wordsSECTION 26Chapter Iii.
6. THE ASSYRIAN INVASION (v. 26-30).--The prophet is, therefore, free to explain that cloud which has appeared far away on the northern horizon. God's hand of judgement is still uplifted over Judah, and it is that hand which summons the cloud. The Assyrians are coming in answer to God's signal, and they are coming as a…
660 wordsSECTION 27_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
Men also abuse sorrow by defying it, but the end of this is madness. "It forms the greater part of the tragedy of _King Lear_, that the aged monarch, though he has given his throne away, retains his imperiousness of heart, and continues to exhibit a senseless, if sometimes picturesque, pride and selfishness in face of …
724 wordsSECTION 28_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
1. THE VISION (vv. 1-4). Several years, then, Isaiah looks back and says, _In the year King Uzziah died._ There is more than a date given here; there is a great contrast suggested. Prophecy does not chronicle by time, but by experiences, and we have here, as it seems, the cardinal experience of a prophet's life. All …
1,011 wordsSECTION 29_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
From this contrast the whole vision expands as follows. Under the mistaken idea that what Isaiah describes is the temple in Jerusalem, it has been remarked, that the place of his vision is wonderful in the case of one who set so little store by ceremonial worship. This, however, to which our prophet looks is no house …
1,061 wordsSECTION 30_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
But while we recognize the exhaustiveness of the series of ideas about the Divine Nature, which develop from the root meaning of holiness, and to express which the word _holy_ is variously used throughout the Scriptures, we must not, if we are to appreciate the use of the word on this occasion, miss the motive of recoi…
881 wordsSECTION 31_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
But while the one verse of the antiphon reiterates what Jehovah of hosts is in Himself, the other describes what He is in revelation. _The whole earth is full of His glory._ Glory is the correlative of holiness. Glory is that in which holiness comes to expression. Glory is the expression of holiness, as beauty is the e…
734 wordsSECTION 32_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
While the prophet thus passionately gathered his guilt upon his lips, a sacrament was preparing on which God concentrated His mercy to meet it. Sacrament and lips, applied mercy and presented sin, now come together. _Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, and in his hand a glowing stone--with tongs had he taken it off …
735 wordsSECTION 33_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
It has always been remarked as one of the most powerful proofs of the originality and Divine force of Christianity, that from man's worship of God, and especially from those parts in which the forgiveness of sin is sought and assured, it did away with the necessity of a physical rite of sacrifice; that it broke the uni…
1,038 wordsSECTION 34_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
One cannot pass away from these verses without observing the plain answer which they give to the question, What is a call to the ministry of God? In these days of dust and distraction, full of party cries, with so many side issues of doctrine and duty presenting themselves, and the solid attractions of so many other se…
1,000 wordsSECTION 35_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
[10] Even Calvin, though in order to prove that Isaiah had been prophesying for some time before his inaugural vision, says that his commission implies some years' actual experience of the obstinacy of the people. But if that clear, bitter way of putting the matter can have come to Isaiah only with the experience o…
1,046 wordsSECTION 36_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
Now there is no more conspicuous instance of this law, than that which is afforded by the preaching of the Gospel of God. God's Word, as Christ reminds us, does not fall on virgin soil; it falls on soil already holding other seed. When a preacher stands up with the Word of God in a great congregation, vast as Scripture…
857 wordsSECTION 37_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
A few sentences from the confessions of the Italian patriot may be quoted, with benefit to our appreciation of what the Hebrew prophet must have passed through. "It was the tempest of doubt, which I believe all who devote their lives to a great enterprise, yet have not dried and withered up their soul--like Robespie…
898 wordsSECTION 38_Isaiah'S Call And Consecration._
_Until cities fall into ruin without an inhabitant, And houses without a man, And the land be left desolately waste, And Jehovah have removed man far away, And great be the desert in the midst of the land; And still if there be a tenth in it, Even it shall be again for consuming. Like the terebinth, and like the…
665 wordsSECTION 39735-730 B.C.
Isaiah's great result at present is the certainty of a remnant. That remnant will require two things--they will require a rallying-point, and they will require a leader. Henceforth Isaiah's prophesying will be bent to one or other of these. The two grand purposes of his word and work will be, for the sake of the remnan…
958 wordsSECTION 40735-730 B.C.
Next in this world of Western Asia come the PHOENICIANS. We may say that they connected Egypt and Assyria, for although Phoenicia proper meant only the hundred and fifty miles of coast between Carmel and the bay of Antioch, the Phoenicians had large colonies on the delta of the Nile and trading posts upon the Euphrates…
763 wordsSECTION 41735-730 B.C.
For a hundred and twenty years before the advent of Isaiah, the annals of the Assyrian kings record periodical campaigns against the cities of "the land of the west," but these isolated incursions were followed by no permanent results. In 745, however, five years before King Uzziah died, a soldier ascended the throne o…
718 wordsSECTION 42735-730 B.C.
From this condemnation we cannot except the people of Jehovah. It is undeniable that the mass of them occupied at this time pretty much the same low religious level as their neighbours. We have already seen (chap. i.) their mean estimate of what God required from themselves; with that corresponded their view of His pos…
997 wordsSECTION 43735-732 B.C.
ISAIAH vii., viii., ix. 1-8. This section of the book of Isaiah (vii.-ix. 7) consists of a number of separate prophecies uttered during a period of at least three years: 735-732 B.C. By 735 Ahaz had ascended the throne; Tiglath-pileser had been occupied in the far east for two years. Taking advantage of the weakness o…
931 wordsSECTION 44735-732 B.C.
[13] There is a play upon words here, which may be reproduced in English by the help of a North-England term: If ye have not _faith_, ye cannot have _staith_. This paraphrase seeks to bring out the meaning of a passage confessedly obscure. It seems as if we had only bits of Isaiah's speech to Ahaz and must supply th…
793 wordsSECTION 45735-732 B.C.
For the higher a man looks, the farther he sees: to us that is the practical lesson of these first nine verses of the seventh chapter. The very gesture of faith bestows upon the mind a breadth of view. The man, who lifts his face to God in heaven, is he whose eyes sweep simultaneously the farthest prospect of earth, an…
945 wordsSECTION 46735-732 B.C.
The whole course of revelation has been bent upon this: to render men familiarly and experimentally acquainted with the character of God, before laying upon them the duty of homage to His creative power or submission to His will. In the Old Testament God is the Friend, the Guide, the Redeemer of men, or ever He is thei…
860 wordsSECTION 47735-732 B.C.
[16] 1 Sam. xii. 17. [17] 1 Kings xiii. 3. [18] Chap. xxxviii. In order to follow intelligently the rest of Isaiah's address, we must clearly understand how the sign which he now promises differs in nature from the sign he had implored Ahaz to select, of whatever sort he may have expected that selection to be. The k…
669 wordsSECTION 48735-732 B.C.
It seems to the present expositor quite impossible to dissociate so solemn an announcement by Jehovah to the house of David of the birth of a Child, so highly named, from that expectation of the coming of a glorious Prince which was current in this royal family since the days of its founder. Mysterious and abrupt as th…
703 wordsSECTION 49735-732 B.C.
II. THE PEOPLE (chap. viii.). The king has been found wanting; but Isaiah will appeal to the people. Chap. viii. is a collection of addresses to them, as chap. vii. was an expostulation with their sovereign. The two chapters are contemporary. In chap. viii. ver. 1, the narrative goes back upon itself, and returns to t…
718 wordsSECTION 50735-732 B.C.
It is a period of powerful currents, a people wholly in drift, and the strongest man of them arrested only by a firm pressure of the Lord's hand. _For Jehovah spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed me, that I should not walk in the way of this people._ The character of the popular movement, _the way of thi…
688 wordsSECTION 51735-732 B.C.
But woe to the people, whose attachment to their land is based upon its material advantages, who have lost their sense for those spiritual presences, from an appreciation of which springs all true love of country, with warrior's courage in her defence and statesman's faith in her destiny! The greatest calamity, which c…
651 wordsSECTION 52735-732 B.C.
[19] Ewald. The Assyrian came on, and the temper of the Jews grew worse. Samaria was indeed doomed from the first, but for some time Isaiah had been excepting Judah from a judgement for which the guilt of Northern Israel was certainly riper. He foresaw, of course, that the impetus of invasion might sweep the Assyrians…
773 wordsSECTION 53735-732 B.C.
The night, however, grew too awful for scorn. There had been no part of the land so given to the idolatrous practices, which the prophet scathed, as _the land of Zebulon and the land of Naphtali, by the sea beyond Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles_. But all the horrors of captivity had now fallen upon it, and it had rece…
749 wordsSECTION 54_The Messiah._
We have now reached that point of Isaiah's prophesying at which the Messiah becomes the most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us take advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the prophet told his generation concerning that exalted and mysterious Person.[22] [22] The Messiah, or _Anointed_, is used …
666 wordsSECTION 55_The Messiah._
If we consider the moment, chosen by Isaiah for announcing the Messiah and adding his seal to the national belief in the advent of a glorious Son of David, we find some significance in the fact that it was a moment, when the throne of David was unworthily filled and David's dynasty was for the first time seriously thre…
772 wordsSECTION 56_The Messiah._
Then, when the prophet's yearning thoughts, that will not rest upon so dark a closure, struggle once more, and struggling pass from despair to pity, and from pity to hope, and from hope to triumph in a salvation actually achieved, they hail all at once as the Hero of it the Son whose birth was promised. With an emphasi…
716 wordsSECTION 57_The Messiah._
[24] _Prophets of Israel_, p. 306. There is a third argument in the same direction, the force of which we appreciate only when we come to discover how very little from this point onwards Isaiah had to say about the promised king. In chaps. i.-xxxix. only three other passages are interpreted as describing the Messiah. …
651 wordsSECTION 58_The Messiah._
On these grounds, then, we decline to believe that Isaiah saw in the king of the future "a God in the metaphysical sense of the word." Just because we know the proofs of the Divinity of Jesus to be so spiritual, do we feel the uselessness of looking for them to prophecies, that manifestly describe purely earthly and ci…
889 wordsSECTION 59_The Messiah._
[26] Stanton: _The Jewish and Christian Messiah_. * * * * * Men do not ask when they drink of a streamlet high up on the hills, "Is this going to be a great river?" They are satisfied if it is water enough to quench their thirst. And so it was enough for Old Testament believers if they found in Isaiah's prophecy of a…
455 wordsSECTION 60Book Ii.
_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH TO THE DEATH OF SARGON, 727-705_ B.C. xxviii. 725 B.C. x. 5-34. 721 B.C. xi., xii. About 720 B.C.? xx. 711 B.C. xxi. 1-10. 710 B.C. xxxviii., xxxix. Between 712 and 705 B.C. The prophecies with which we have been engaged (chaps. ii.-x. 4) fall either before or during th…
719 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.