PUBLIC-DOMAIN CHRISTIAN BOOK
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah, Volume 2 (of 2)
Smith, George Adam · 147,013 words · 201 reading sections
Ii. The Substance Of Service.
The substance of the Servant's work is stated in one word, uttered thrice in emphatic positions. _Judgement for the nations shall he bring forth.... According to truth shall he bring forth judgement.... He shall not flag nor break, till he set in the earth_[180] _judgement._ The English word _judgement_ is a natural b…
1,019 wordsSECTION 122Iii. The Temper Of Service.
1. _He shall not cry, nor lift up, Nor make his voice to be heard in the street._ There is nothing more characteristic of our prophecy than its belief in the power of speech, its exultation in the music and spell of the human voice. It opens with a chorus of high calls: none are so lovely to it as heralds, or so musi…
937 wordsSECTION 123Iii. The Temper Of Service.
What, then, shall tell us how far we can go? What shall teach us how to be eloquent without screaming, clear without being loud, impressive without wasting our strength in seeking to make an impression? These questions bring us back to what we started with, as the indispensable requisite for Service--some guiding and r…
735 wordsSECTION 124Iii. The Temper Of Service.
But while this national reference may be the one originally meant, the splendid vagueness of the metaphor forbids us to be content with it, or with any solitary application. For the two clauses are as the eyes of the All-Pitiful Father, that rest wherever on this broad earth there is any life, though it be so low as to…
726 wordsSECTION 125Iv. The Power Behind Service.
He who, in his Service of Man, practises such a temper towards the breaking and the fading, shall never himself break or fade, as this prophecy implies when it uses the same verbs in verses _three_ and _four_. For he who is loyal to life shall find life generous to him; he who is careful of weakness shall never want fo…
683 wordsSECTION 126Footnotes:
[177] The English equivalent is, _nor is loud_. [178] This time with the article, so not _the land_ of Judah only, but _the Earth_. [179] Bax, _Religion of Socialism_. [180] This time "arets" with the article. So not the _land_ of Judah only but the world. [181] The following are the four main meanings of "mishpat"…
383 wordsSECTION 127_Prophet And Martyr._
ISAIAH xlix. 1-9; l. 4-11. The second great passage upon the Servant of the Lord is ch. xlix. 1-9, and the third is ch. l. 4-11. In both of these the servant himself speaks; in both he speaks as prophet; while in the second he tells us that his prophecy leads him on to martyrdom. The two passages may, therefore, be ta…
669 wordsSECTION 128_Prophet And Martyr._
* * * * * Babylon is left behind, and the way of the Lord is prepared in the desert. Israel have once more the title-deeds to their own land, and Zion looms in sight. Yet with their face to home, and their heart upon freedom, the voice of this people, or at least of the better half of this people, rises first upon the…
640 wordsSECTION 129I. The Servant Glorifies God.
_He did say to me, My servant art thou, Israel, in whom I shall break into glory._ The Hebrew verb, which the Authorised Version translates _will be glorified_, means to _burst forth_, _become visible_, break like the dawn into splendour. This is the scriptural sense of Glory. Glory is God become visible. As we put i…
789 wordsSECTION 130Ii. The Servant As Prophet.
* * * * * It was said above, that, as light breaks to visibleness either from a mirror or a wick, so God _breaks to glory_ either from the witness of men,--that is His mirror,--or from their sacrifice--that is His wick. Of both of these ways of glorifying God is the Servant conscious. His service is Speech and Sacrifi…
650 wordsSECTION 131Ii. The Servant As Prophet.
Now, when we look within ourselves we see the reason of this. We perceive that the one fact, which amid the mystery and chaos of our inner life gives certainty and light, is a fact which is a Voice. Our nature may be wrecked and dissipated, but conscience is always left; or in ignorance and gloom, but conscience is alw…
777 wordsSECTION 132Ii. The Servant As Prophet.
To him the discipline and qualification of the prophet nation--and that means, of every Servant of God--in the high office of the Word, are threefold. 1. First, he lays down the supreme condition of Prophecy, that behind the Voice there must be the Life. Before he speaks of his gifts of Speech, the Servant emphasizes …
891 wordsSECTION 133Iii. The Servant As Martyr.
But serviceable speech needs more than attentiveness and experience. Having gained the truth, the prophet must be obedient and loyal to it. Yet obedience and loyalty to the truth are the beginnings of martyrdom, of which the Servant now goes on to speak as the natural and immediate consequence of his prophecy. The cla…
655 wordsSECTION 134Iii. The Servant As Martyr.
These are not national sufferings. They are no reflection of the hard usage which the captive Israel suffered from Babylon. They are the reflection of the reproach and pains, which, for the sake of God's word, individual Israelites more than once experienced from their own nation. But if individual experience, and not …
706 wordsSECTION 135Iii. The Servant As Martyr.
These lines, in which the Holy Servant, the Martyr of the Word, defies the world and asserts that God shall vindicate his innocence, are taken by Paul and used to assert the justification, which every believer enjoys through faith in the sufferings of Him, who was indeed the Holy Servant of God.[200] The last two vers…
484 wordsSECTION 136Footnotes:
[187] This, of course, goes against Prof. Briggs's theory of the composition of Isa. xl.-lxvi. out of two poems (see p. 18). [188] This line is full of the letter m. [189] This is as the text is written; but the Massoretic reading gives, _that Israel to Him may be gathered_. [190] So it seems best to give the sense …
268 wordsSECTION 137_The Suffering Servant._
ISAIAH lii. 13-liii. We are now arrived at the last of the passages on the Servant of the Lord. It is known to Christendom as the Fifty-third of Isaiah, but its verses have, unfortunately, been divided between two chapters, lii. 13-15 and liii. Before we attempt the interpretation of this high and solemn passage of Re…
836 wordsSECTION 138_The Suffering Servant._
Each strophe, it is well to notice, begins with one word or two words which summarise the meaning of the whole strophe and form a title for it. Thus, after the opening exclamation _Behold_, the words _My Servant shall prosper_ form, as we shall see, not only a summary of the first strophe, in which his ultimate exaltat…
819 wordsSECTION 139Ii.
Most wonderful and mysterious of all is the spectral fashion in which the prophecy presents its Hero. He is named only in the first line and once again: elsewhere He is spoken of as He. We never hear or see Himself. But all the more solemnly is He there: a shadow upon countless faces, a grievous memory on the hearts of…
307 wordsSECTION 140V.
_Surely our ailments he bore,_ _And our pains he did take for his burden._[210] _But we--we accounted him stricken,_ _Smitten of God and degraded._[211] _Yet he--he was pierced for crimes that were ours,_[212] _He was crushed for guilt that was ours,_[212] _The chastisement of our peace was upon him,_ _By his st…
810 wordsSECTION 141V.
But of themselves men do not see this, and they need to be convinced. Pain, the blessed means of God, is man's abhorrence and perplexity. All along the history of the world the Sufferer has been the astonishment and stumbling-block of humanity. The barbarian gets rid of him; he is the first difficulty with which every …
744 wordsSECTION 142V.
In vv. 2 and 3 the penitent speakers give us the reasons of their disregard of the Servant in the days of his suffering. In these reasons there is nothing peculiar to Israel, and no special experience of Jewish history is reflected by the terms in which they are conveyed. They are the confession, in general language, o…
821 wordsSECTION 143V.
But how did they get this knowledge? They do not describe any special means by which it came to them. They state this high and novel truth simply as the last step in a process of their consciousness. At first they were bewildered by the Servant's suffering; then they thought it contemptible, thus passing upon it an int…
658 wordsSECTION 144V.
But even more than its necessity life teaches us its virtue. Vicarious suffering is not a curse. It is Service--Service for God. It proves a power where every other moral force has failed. By it men are redeemed, on whom justice and their proper punishment have been able to effect nothing. Why this should be is very in…
704 wordsSECTION 145V.
_He said, that He would destroy them, Had not Moses His chosen stood before Him in the breach, To turn away His wrath, lest He should destroy._[226] And Jeremiah, not by a single heroic resolve, but by the slow agony and martyrdom of a long life, had taken Jerusalem's sin upon his own heart, had felt himself forsake…
752 wordsSECTION 146V.
The next two verses (8, 9) describe how the Servant's Passion was fulfilled. The figure of a sick man was changed in ver. 5 to that of a punished one, and the punishment we now see carried on to death. The two verses are difficult, the readings and renderings of most of the words being very various. But the sense is cl…
736 wordsSECTION 147V.
God's purpose in putting the Servant to death is explained in the rest of the verse. It was in order that _through his soul making a guilt-offering, he might see a seed, prolong his days, and that the pleasure of the Lord might prosper by his hand_. What is a guilt-offering? The term originally meant guilt, and is so …
826 wordsSECTION 148V.
And so it was at this point, according to our prophecy, that the Servant, though brought so low, was nearest his exaltation; though in death, yet nearest life, nearest the highest kind of life, _the seeing of a seed_, the finding of himself in others; though despised, rejected and forgotten of men, most certain of find…
732 wordsSECTION 149V.
And again, exactly as the judicial murder of the Servant, and the entire absence from his contemporaries of any idea that he suffered a vicarious death, suit the case of Christ, the next stage in the Servant's fate was not true of the Victim of Pilate and the Pharisees. Christ's grave was not with the wicked. He suffer…
668 wordsSECTION 150V.
And, _secondly_, like the Servant, Jesus _dealt prudently, had insight_. The will of God in His suffering was no mystery to Him. He understood from the first why He was to suffer.[236] The reasons He gave were the same two and in the same order as are given by our prophet for the sufferings of the Servant,--first, tha…
671 wordsSECTION 151V.
And _He has seen His seed_; He _has made many righteous_. We found it to be uncertain whether the penitent speakers in ch. liii. understood that the Servant by coming under the physical sufferings, which were the consequences of their sins, relieved them of these consequences; other passages in the prophecy would seem …
653 wordsSECTION 152Footnotes:
[203] Thus Ewald supposed ch. lii. 13-liii. to be an elegy upon some martyr in the persecutions under Manasseh. Professor Briggs, as we have noticed before, claims to have discovered that all the passages in the Servant are parts of a trimeter poem, older than the rest of the prophecy, which he finds to be in hexameter…
651 wordsSECTION 153Footnotes:
[220] Jer. xxiii. 5. [221] Hitzig (among others) held that it is the prophets who are the speakers of ver. 1, and that the voices of the penitent people come in only with ver. 2 or ver. 3. In that case מועתינוש would mean _what we heard from God_ (מועהש is elsewhere used for the prophetic message) and delivered to the…
691 wordsSECTION 154Footnotes:
[224] But they do not tell us, whether they were totally exempted from suffering by the Servant's pains, or whether they also suffered with him the consequence of their misdeeds. For that question is not now present to their minds. Whether they also suffer or not (and other chapters in the prophecy emphasize the people…
398 wordsSECTION 155Book Iv.
We have now reached the summit of our prophecy. It has been a long, steep ascent, and we have had very much to seek out on the way, and to extricate and solve and load ourselves with. But although a long extent of the prophecy, if we measure it by chapters, still lies before us, the end is in sight; every difficulty ha…
789 wordsSECTION 156Book Iv.
And as they started naturally from the Servant's work in xlix. 1-9_a_ and his example in l. 4-11, so upon his final and crowning work in ch. liii. there follow as naturally ch. liv. (the prospect of _the seed_ that liii. 10 promised he should see), and ch. lv. (a new call to come forth). These two, with the little pre-…
331 wordsSECTION 157_Doubts In The Way._
ISAIAH xlix.-lii. 12. Chapters xlix.-liii. are, as we have seen, a series of more or less closely joined passages, in which the prophet, having already made the political redemption of Israel certain through Cyrus, and having dismissed Cyrus from his thoughts, addresses himself to various difficulties in the way of re…
433 wordsSECTION 158I.
In ch. xlix. 9_b_ God's promise of the return of the redeemed proceeds naturally from that of their ransom by the Servant. It is hailed by a song in ver. 13, and the rest of the section is the answer to three doubts, which, like sobs, interrupt the music. But the prophecy, stooping, as it were, to kiss the trembling li…
1,010 wordsSECTION 159I.
Upon those great thoughts, that God's are all strong things and all weak things, and that the real and the certain in life is His will, the prophecy breaks into a vision of multitudes in motion. There is a great stirring and hastening, crowds gather up through the verses, the land is lifted and thronged. _Lift up thine…
709 wordsSECTION 160I.
Two kinds of generations of men have most tended to be necessitarian in their philosophy,--the generations which have given themselves over to do evil, and the generations whose political experience or whose science has impressed them with the inevitable physical results of sin. If belief in a Divine Redeemer, able to …
848 wordsSECTION 161I.
II. li.-lii. 12. Passing over the passage on the Servant, ch. l. 4-11, we reach a second series of exhortations in face of Doubts in the Way of the Return. The first of this new series is li. 1-3. Their doubts having been answered with regard to God's mindfulness of them and His power to save them, the loyal Israelit…
798 wordsSECTION 162I.
When all Doubts in the Way have now been removed, what can remain but a great impatience to achieve at once the near salvation? To this impatience the loosened hearts give voice in vv. 9-11: _Awake, awake, put on strength, Arm of Jehovah; awake as in the days of old, ages far past!_ Not in vain have Israel been called …
788 wordsSECTION 163Footnotes:
Thus the prophet, after finishing his long argument and dispelling the doubts that still lingered at its close, returns to the first high notes and the first dear subject with which he opened in ch. xl. In face of so open a way, so unclouded a prospect, nothing remains but to repeat, and this time with greater strength…
557 wordsSECTION 164_On The Eve Of Return._
ISAIAH liv.-lvi. 8. One of the difficult problems of our prophecy is the relation and grouping of chs. liv.-lix. It is among them that the unity of "Second Isaiah," which up to this point we have seen no reason to doubt, gives way. Ch. lvi. 9-lvii. is evidently pre-exilic, and so is ch. lix. But in chs. liv., lv., and…
858 wordsSECTION 165_On The Eve Of Return._
In this new creation of the marriage bond between God and His church, three prophets had a large share,--Hosea, Ezekiel and the author of "Second Isaiah." To Hosea and Ezekiel it fell to speak chiefly of unpleasant aspects of the question,--the unfaithfulness of the wife and her divorce; but even then, the moral streng…
719 wordsSECTION 166_On The Eve Of Return._
The commercial character of the opening figures of ch. lv. arrests the attention. We saw that Babylon was the centre of the world's trade, and that it was in Babylon that the Jews first formed those mercantile habits, which have become, next to religion, or in place of religion, their national character. Born to be pri…
699 wordsSECTION 167_On The Eve Of Return._
The next verses urgently repeat calls to repentance. And then comes a passage which is grandly meant to make us feel the contrast of its scenery with the toil, the money-getting and the money-spending from which the chapter started. From all that sordid, barren, human strife in the markets of Babylon, we are led out to…
720 wordsSECTION 168Footnotes:
[247] _Cf._ pp. 336 ff. [248] See pp. 247 ff. [249] "Das eigentliche Wort 'Liebe' kommt im A. T. von Gott fast gar nicht vor,--und wo es, bei einem späten Schriftsteller, vorkommt, ist es Bezeichnung seiner besondren Bundes-liebe zu Israel, deren natürliche Kehrseite der Hass gegen die feindlichen Völker ist."--Schul…
481 wordsSECTION 169_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
ISAIAH lvi. 9-lix. It was inevitable, as soon as their city was again fairly in sight, that there should re-awaken in the exiles the civic conscience; that recollections of those besetting sins of their public life, for which their city and their independence were destroyed, should throng back upon them; that in prosp…
687 wordsSECTION 170_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
Then the prophet indicts the nation for a religious and political unfaithfulness, which we know was their besetting sin in the days before they left the Holy Land. The scenery, in whose natural objects he describes them seeking their worship, is the scenery of Palestine, not of Mesopotamia,--_terebinths_ and _wâdies_, …
665 wordsSECTION 171_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
For let the date and original purpose of the fragments we have considered be what they may, this prophecy has been placed as their conclusion with at least some rational, not to say spiritual, intention. As it suddenly issues here, it gathers up, in the usual habit of Scripture, God's moral indictment of an evil genera…
933 wordsSECTION 172_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
Those, who have never heard an angry Oriental speak, have no idea of what power of denunciation lies in the human throat. In the East, where a dry climate and large leisure bestow upon the voice a depth and suppleness prevented by our vulgar haste of life and teasing weather, men have elaborated their throat-letters to…
1,438 wordsSECTION 173_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
And yet such a prophecy concludes with an exhortation to the observance of one religious form, and places the keeping of the Sabbath on a level with the practice of love. _If thou turn from the Sabbath thy foot_, from _doing thine own business on My holy day;_[269] _and callest the Sabbath Pleasure_,--the word is a str…
827 wordsSECTION 174_The Rekindling Of The Civic Conscience._
Are we then left with a mystery? On the contrary, the solution is clear. Israel is followed into exile by her old conscience. The charges of Isaiah and Ezekiel against Jerusalem, while Jerusalem was still a "civitas," ring in her memory. She repeats the very words. With truth she says that her present state, so vividly…
1,040 wordsSECTION 175Footnotes:
[258] See vol. i., pp. 363, 364. [259] So Ewald, Cheyne and Briggs. Ewald takes lvi. 9-lvii. 11_a_ as an interruption, borrowed from an earlier prophet in a time of persecution, of the exilic prophecy, which goes on smoothly from lvi. 8 to lvii. 11_b_. We have seen that it is an error to suppose that lvi. 9-lvii. rose…
581 wordsSECTION 176_Salvation In Sight._
ISAIAH lx.-lxiii. 7. The deliverance from Babylon has long been certain, since ch. xlviii.; all doubts in the way of Return have been removed, ch. xlix.-lii. 12; the means for the spiritual Restoration of the people have been sufficiently found, ch. liii. and preceding chapters on the Servant; Zion has been hailed fro…
792 wordsSECTION 177_Salvation In Sight._
The next verses are simply the expansion of these two clauses,--about the sea's flood and the wealth of the Nations. Vv. 6-9 look first landward and then seaward, as from Jerusalem's own wonderful position on the high ridge between Asia and the sea: between the gates of the East and the gates of the West. On the one si…
691 wordsSECTION 178_Salvation In Sight._
The last of these duties we may extend and qualify. If the coming in of the Gentiles is here represented as bringing wealth to the Church, we cannot help remembering that the going out to the Gentiles, in order to bring them in, means for us the spending of our wealth on things other than the adornment of temples; and …
839 wordsSECTION 179_Salvation In Sight._
If ch. lx. showed us the external glory of God's people, ch. lxi. opens with the programme of their inner mission. There we had the building and adornment of the Temple, that _Jehovah might glorify His people_: here we have the binding of broken hearts and the beautifying of soiled lives, that _Jehovah may be glorified…
779 wordsSECTION 180_Salvation In Sight._
But _good tidings_ and the _proclamation_ meant so much more than the mere political deliverance of Israel--meant the fact of their pardon, the tale of their God's love, of His provision for them, and of His wonderful passion and triumph of salvation on their behalf--that it is no wonder that these two words came to be…
709 wordsSource & rights
Public domain in the USA; original historical text digitized by Project Gutenberg.
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Historical Christian writing; not Scripture.