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
Book Iv.
xxxvi. 1. Early in 701. i. " " xxii. " " xxxiii. A little later. xxxvi. 2-xxxvii. " " _______ xxxviii.-xxxix. Date uncertain. Into this fourth book we put all the rest of the prophecies of the Book of Isaiah, that have to do with the prophet's own time: chaps. i., xxii. and xxxiii., with the narrative in xxxvi.,…
646 wordsSECTION 122_At The Lowest Ebb._
ISAIAH i. and xxii. (701 B.C.). In the drama of Isaiah's life we have now arrived at the final act--a short and sharp one of a few months. The time is 701 B.C., the fortieth year of Isaiah's ministry, and about the twenty-sixth of Hezekiah's reign. The background is the invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib. The stage …
833 wordsSECTION 123_At The Lowest Ebb._
Ten years before this Sargon had set Padi, a vassal of his own, as king over Ekron; but the Ekronites had risen against Padi, put him in chains, and sent him to their ally Hezekiah, who now held him in Jerusalem. "These men," says Sennacherib, "were now terrified in their hearts; the shadows of death overwhelmed them."…
892 wordsSECTION 124_At The Lowest Ebb._
[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 o…
757 wordsSECTION 125_At The Lowest Ebb._
_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!…
703 wordsSECTION 126_At The Lowest Ebb._
* * * * * Nevertheless, Isaiah had still respect to the ultimate survival of a remnant. How firmly he believed in it could not be more clearly illustrated 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 fut…
770 wordsSECTION 127_The Turn Of The Tide: Moral Effects Of Forgiveness._
[59] Isa. xxxvi. 3. So we have not one, but a couple of tragedies. Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, follows Shebna, the son of Nobody. The fate of the overburdened nail is as grievous as that of the rolling stone. It is easy to pass this prophecy over as a trivial incident; but when we have carefully analysed each verse, …
710 wordsSECTION 128_The Turn Of The Tide: Moral Effects Of Forgiveness._
[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. Bu…
811 wordsSECTION 129_The Turn Of The Tide: Moral Effects Of Forgiveness._
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 passionate lover of his city, but through circumstance her pitiless critic and unsparing judge. In all the literature of patriotism there are no finer odes and orations than those wh…
856 wordsSECTION 130_The Turn Of The Tide: Moral Effects Of Forgiveness._
[62] Didron _Christian Iconography_, fig. 52. But the absoluteness of God'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 God gives pardon He…
697 wordsSECTION 131_Our God A Consuming Fire._
But if pardon means the return of God to the soul, then in this we have the secret of the return of the foe. Men could not try nor develop a sense of the former except by their experience of the latter. We have seen why Isaiah must have welcomed the perfidious reappearance of the Assyrians after he had helped to buy th…
660 wordsSECTION 132_Our God A Consuming Fire._
After an application of this same fire of God's righteousness to the sinners _within_ Jerusalem, to which we shall presently return, the rest of the chapter pictures the stunned populace awaking to the fact that they are free. Is the Assyrian really gone, or do the Jews dream as they crowd the walls, and see no trace o…
851 wordsSECTION 133_Our God A Consuming Fire._
We are familiar with Isaiah's fundamental God-with-us, and how it was spoken not for mercy only, but for judgement (chap. viii.). If _God-with-us_ meant love with us, salvation with us, it meant also holiness with us, judgement with us, the jealousy of God breathing upon what is impure, false and proud. Isaiah felt thi…
688 wordsSECTION 134_Our God A Consuming Fire._
[64] Chaps. iv. 4; xxx. 33. * * * * * Isaiah's Vision of Fire suggests two thoughts to us. 1. Have we done well to confine our horror of the consuming fires of righteousness to the next life? If we would but use the eyes which Scripture lends us, the rifts of prophetic vision and awakened conscience by which the fog…
676 wordsSECTION 135_Our God A Consuming Fire._
But fascinating as life is when seen through this formula, does not the formula act on our vision precisely as the glass we supposed, which when we look through it on a conflagration shows us the solid matter and the changes through which this passes, but hides from us the real agent? One need not deny the reality of t…
803 wordsSECTION 136_The Rabshakeh; Or, Last Temptations Of Faith._
We can explain much with the outward eye, but the most of the explanation lies beyond. Where our knowledge of a man's life ends, the great meaning of it often only begins. All the vacancy beyond the outline we see is full of that meaning. God is there, and _God is a consuming fire_. Let us not seek to explain lives onl…
698 wordsSECTION 137The Rabshakeh.
This word is a Hebrew transliteration of the Assyrian Rab-sak, _chief of the officers_. Though there is some doubt on the point, we may naturally presume from the duties he here discharges that the Rabshakeh was a civilian--probably the civil commissioner or political officer attached to the Assyrian army, which was co…
1,028 wordsSECTION 138The Rabshakeh.
So clever were the speeches of the Rabshakeh. We see why he was appointed to this mission. He was an expert both in the language and religion of this tribe, perched on its rock in the remote Judæan highlands. For a foreigner he showed marvellous familiarity with the temper and internal jealousies of the Jewish religion…
1,122 wordsSECTION 139_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
In spite of scorn and sensuous promise from Rabshakeh to Rénan, let us lift the hymn which these silent Jews at last lifted from the walls of their delivered city: _Walk about Zion and go round about her; tell ye the towers thereof. Mark ye well her bulwarks, and consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generat…
709 wordsSECTION 140_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
And then over these disappointments there faces us all the great miscarriage itself--black, inevitable death. Hezekiah cried from despair that the Divine assurance of the permanence of God's people in the world was about to be wrecked on fact. But often by a deathbed we utter the same lament about the individual's immo…
731 wordsSECTION 141_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
The baffled Rabshakeh returned to his master, whom he found at Libnah, _for he had heard that he had broken up from Lachish_. Sennacherib, the narrative would seem to imply, did not trouble himself further about Jerusalem till he learned that Tirhakah, the Ethiopian ruler of Egypt, was marching to meet him with probabl…
730 wordsSECTION 142_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
* * * * * At last in a single night the deliverance miraculously came. It is implied by the scattered accounts of those days of salvation, that an Assyrian corps continued to sit before Jerusalem even after the Rabshakeh had returned to the headquarters of Sennacherib. The thirty-third of Isaiah, as well as those Psal…
654 wordsSECTION 143_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
The neighbourhood in which the Assyrian army suffered this great disaster[67] was notorious in antiquity for its power of pestilence. Making every allowance for the untutored imagination of the ancients, we must admit the Serbonian bog, between Syria and Egypt, to have been a place terrible for filth and miasma. The no…
796 wordsSECTION 144_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
Nevertheless, the story of Jehovah's triumph cannot be justly recounted without including the reaction which followed upon it within the same generation. Before twenty years had passed from the day, on which Jerusalem, with the forty-sixth Psalm on her lips, sought with all her heart the God of Isaiah, she relapsed int…
726 wordsSECTION 145_This Is The Victory.... Our Faith._
* * * * * _In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence is your strength._ How divine Isaiah's message is, may be proved by the length of time mankind is taking to learn it. The remarkable thing is, that he staked so lofty a principle, and the pure religion of which it was the temper, upon a…
556 wordsSECTION 146Chapter Xxiv.
_A REVIEW OF ISAIAH'S PREDICTIONS CONCERNING THE DELIVERANCE OF JERUSALEM._ As we have gathered together all that Isaiah prophesied concerning the Messiah, so it may be useful for closer students of his book if we now summarise (even at the risk of a little repetition) the facts of his marvellous prediction of the sie…
792 wordsSECTION 147Chapter Xxiv.
4. Now, with regard to the method of Jerusalem's deliverance, Isaiah has uniformly described this as happening not by human battle. From the beginning he said that Israel should be delivered in the last extremity of their weakness (vi. 13). On the Assyrian's arrival over against the city, Jehovah is to lop him off (x. …
777 wordsSECTION 148Chapter Xxiv.
There is thus, with great modifications, an analogy between the prophet and the scientific observer of the present day. Men of science are able to affirm the certainty of natural phenomena by their knowledge of the laws and principles of nature. Certain forces being present, certain results must come to pass. The Old T…
518 wordsSECTION 149Chapter Xxv.
_AN OLD TESTAMENT BELIEVER'S SICK-BED; OR, THE DIFFERENCE CHRIST HAS MADE._ ISAIAH xxxviii.; xxxix. (DATE UNCERTAIN). To the great national drama of Jerusalem's deliverance, there have been added two scenes of a personal kind, relating to her king. Chaps. xxxviii. and xxxix. are the narrative of the sore sickness and…
706 wordsSECTION 150I.
Again, here is a man to whom religion gave all it could give without the help of Christ; a believer in the religion out of which Christianity sprang, perhaps the most representative Old Testament believer we could find, for Hezekiah was at once the collector of what was best in its literature and the reformer of what w…
776 wordsSECTION 151I.
While recognising for our own faith the uselessness of a discussion on this sign offered to a sick man, let us not miss the moral lessons of so touching a narrative, nor the sympathy with the sick king which it is fitted to produce, and which is our best introduction to the study of his hymn. Isaiah had performed that…
779 wordsSECTION 152I.
Forgiveness, a new peace, a new dignity and a visit from the living God! Well might Hezekiah exclaim that it was only through a near sense of death that men rightly learned to live. _Ah, Lord, it is upon these things that men live; and wholly therein is the life of my spirit._ It is by these things men live, and therei…
822 wordsSECTION 153Ii.
It is easier to win spoils from death than to keep them untarnished by life. Shame burns warm in a soldier's heart when he sees the arms he risked life to win rusting for want of a little care. Ours will not burn less if we discover that the strength of character we brought with us out of some great tribulation has bee…
847 wordsSECTION 154Ii.
Now compare all this with the Psalms of Christian hope; with the faith that fills Paul; with his ardour who says, _To me to depart is far better_; with the glory which John beholds with open face: the hosts of the redeemed praising God and walking in the light of His face, all the geography of that country laid down, a…
476 wordsSECTION 155Had Isaiah A Gospel For The Individual?
The two narratives, in which Isaiah's career culminates--that of the Deliverance of Jerusalem (xxxvi.; xxxvii.) and that of the Recovery of Hezekiah (xxxviii.; xxxix.)--cannot fail, coming together as they do, to suggest to thoughtful readers a striking contrast between Isaiah's treatment of the community and his treat…
683 wordsSECTION 156Had Isaiah A Gospel For The Individual?
Had Isaiah then no gospel for the individual? This will indeed seem impossible to us if we keep in view the following considerations:-- 1. ISAIAH HIMSELF had passed through a powerfully individual experience. He had not only felt the solidarity of the people's sin--_I dwell among a people of unclean lips_--he had firs…
698 wordsSECTION 157Had Isaiah A Gospel For The Individual?
Isaiah had then, without doubt, a gospel for the individual; and to this day the individual may plainly read it in his book, may truly, strongly, joyfully live by it--so deeply does it begin, so much does it help to self-knowledge and self-analysis, so lofty are the ideals and responsibilities which it presents. But is…
690 wordsSECTION 158Had Isaiah A Gospel For The Individual?
But further in his favourite gospel of the REASONABLENESS OF GOD--that God does not work fruitlessly, nor create and cultivate with a view to judgement and destruction--Isaiah was furnishing an argument for personal immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted. In a recent work on _The Destiny of Man_[74] the…
392 wordsSECTION 159Book V.
xiii.-xiv. 23 xxiv.-xxvii. xxxiv. xxxv. In the first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah--the half which refers to the prophet's own career and the politics contemporary with that--we find four or five prophecies containing no reference to Isaiah himself nor to any Jewish king under whom he laboured, and pai…
675 wordsSECTION 160Book V.
On the other hand, Isaiah's authorship of these prophecies, or at least the possibility of his having written them, is usually defended by appealing to his promise of the return from exile in chap. xi. and his threat of a Babylonish captivity in chap. xxxix. This is an argument that has not been fairly met by those who…
525 wordsSECTION 161Babylon And Lucifer.
ISAIAH xiii. 2-xiv. 23 (DATE UNCERTAIN). This double oracle is against the City (xiii. 2-xiv. 2) and the Tyrant (xiv. 3-23) of Babylon. I. THE WICKED CITY (xiii. 2-xiv. 23). The first part is a series of hurried and vanishing scenes--glimpses of ruin and deliverance caught through the smoke and turmoil of a Divine w…
837 wordsSECTION 162Babylon And Lucifer.
The lessons of the passage are two: that the people of God are something distinct from civilisation, though this be universal and absorbent as a very Babylon; and that the resources of civilisation are not even in material strength the highest in the universe, but God has in His armoury weapons heedless of men's cunnin…
792 wordsSECTION 163Babylon And Lucifer.
[75] "Those principles of natural philosophy which smothered the religions of the East with their rank and injurious growth are almost entirely absent from the religion of the Hebrews. Here the motive-power of development is to be found in ethical ideas, which, though not indeed alien to the life of other nations, …
745 wordsSECTION 164I.
_The kings of the earth set themselves, And the rulers take counsel together, Against the Lord and against His Anointed. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; The Lord shall have them in derision._ He who has heard that laughter sees no comedy in aught else. This is the one unfailing subject of Hebrew satire…
250 wordsSECTION 165Iv.
Sheol from under shuddereth at thee To meet thine arrival, Stirring up for thee the shades, All great-goats of earth! Lifteth erect from their thrones All kings of peoples. 10. _All of them answer and say to thee,_-- "Thou, too, made flaccid like us, To us hast been levelled! Hurled to Sheol is the pride of th…
302 wordsSECTION 166_The Effect Of Sin On Our Material Circumstance._
But I will arise upon them, Sayeth Jehovah of hosts; And I will cut off from Babel Record and remnant, And scion and seed, Saith Jehovah: Yea, I will make it the bittern's heritage, Marshes of water! And I will sweep it with sweeps of destruction, Sayeth Jehovah of hosts. ISAIAH xxiv. (DATE UNCERTAIN). The t…
723 wordsSECTION 167_The Effect Of Sin On Our Material Circumstance._
What awful truth is this for illustration 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 ju…
915 wordsSECTION 168_The Effect Of Sin On Our Material Circumstance._
The whole earth is to be broken up and dissolved. What then is to become of the people of God--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 s…
747 wordsSECTION 169_The Effect Of Sin On Our Material Circumstance._
When we pass 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 p…
932 wordsSECTION 170_The Effect Of Sin On Our Material Circumstance._
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 circumstances, 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 se…
266 wordsSECTION 171_God'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. xx…
776 wordsSECTION 172_God'S Poor._
If this character which we attribute to the prophecy be correct--viz., that it is a summary or ideal account of the attitude of the alien world to Israel, and of the judgement God 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…
812 wordsSECTION 173_God'S Poor._
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 transmute the most afflicting experiences of life into virtuous disposition and effectual desire for God. We see this most clearly if we contrast the He…
1,075 wordsSECTION 174_God'S Poor._
_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 pove…
1,133 wordsSECTION 175_God'S Poor._
3. POVERTY OF THE EXILE. But as fair flowers bloom upon rough stalks, so from Israel's stern challenges of justice there break sweet prayers for home. Chap. xxxiv., the effusion of vengeance on Edom, is followed by chap. xxxv., the going forth of hope to the return from exile and the establishment of the ransomed of th…
677 wordsSECTION 176_God'S Poor._
An Arctic explorer was once asked, whether during eight months of slow starvation which he and his comrades endured they suffered much from the pangs of hunger. No, he answered, we lost them in the sense of abandonment, in the feeling that our countrymen had forgotten us and were not coming to the rescue. It was not ti…
262 wordsSECTION 177_The Resurrection._
ISAIAH xxvi. 14-19; xxv. 6-9. Granted the pardon, the justice, the Temple and the God, which the returning exiles now enjoyed, the possession of these only makes more painful the shortness of life itself. This life is too shallow and too frail a vessel to hold peace and righteousness and worship and the love of God. S…
814 wordsSECTION 178_The Resurrection._
[86] English version, _fallen; i.e._, like our expression for the birth of animals, _dropped_. The figures are bold. Israel achieves, through God's grace, everything but the recovery of her dead; this, which alone is worth calling _salvation_, remains wanting to her great record of deliverances. The living Israel is …
661 wordsSECTION 179_The Resurrection._
But for dust there is dew, and even to graveyards the morning comes that brings dew and light together. The wonder of dew is that it is given from a clear heaven, and that it comes to sight with the dawn. If the Oriental looks up when dew is falling, he sees nothing to thank for it between him and the stars. If he sees…
834 wordsSECTION 180_The Resurrection._
Thus in its foundation the Old Testament doctrine of the resurrection is but the conviction of the sufficiency of God Himself, a conviction which Christ turned upon Himself when He said, _I am the Resurrection and the Life. Because I live, ye shall live also._ If any object that in this picture of a resurrection we ha…
520 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg source record →
Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.