_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 forsaken of God, and had voluntarily shared his city's doom, while his generation, unconscious of their guilt and blind to their fate, despised him and esteemed him not. And Ezekiel, who is Jeremiah's far-off reflection, who could only do in symbol what Jeremiah did in reality, was commanded to lie on his side for days, and so _bear the guilt_ of his people.[227]
But in Israel's experience it was not only the human Servant who served the nation by suffering, for God Himself had come down to _carry_ His distressed and accursed people, and _to load Himself with them_. Our prophet uses the same two verbs of Jehovah as are used of the Servant.[228] Like the Servant, too, God _was afflicted in all their affliction_; and His love towards them was expended in passion and agony for their sins. Vicarious suffering was not only human, it was Divine.
Was it very wonderful that a people with such an experience, and with such examples, both human and Divine, should at last be led to the thought of One Sufferer, who would exhibit in Himself all the meaning, and procure for His people all the virtue, of that vicarious reproach and sorrow, which a long line of their martyrs had illustrated, and which God had revealed as the passion of His own love? If they had had every example that could fit them to understand the power of such a sufferer, they had also every reason to feel their need of Him. For the Exile had not healed the nation; it had been for the most of them an illustration of that evil effect of punishment to which we alluded above. Penal servitude in Babylon had but hardened Israel. _God poured on him the fury of anger, and the strength of battle: it set him on fire round about, yet he knew not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart._[229] What the Exile, then, had failed to do, when it brought upon the people their own sins, the Servant, taking these sins upon himself, would surely effect. The people, whom the Exile had only hardened, his vicarious suffering should strike into penitence and lift to peace.
IV. Ch. liii. 7-9. It is probable that with ver. 6 the penitent people have ceased speaking, and that the parable is now taken up by the prophet himself. The voice of God, which uttered the first strophe, does not seem to resume till ver. 11.
If strophe iii. confessed that it was for the people's sins the Servant suffered, strophe iv. declares that he himself was sinless, and yet silently submitted to all which injustice laid upon him.
Now Silence under Suffering is a strange thing in the Old Testament--a thing absolutely new. No other Old Testament personage could stay dumb under pain, but immediately broke into one of two voices,--voice of guilt or voice of doubt. In the Old Testament the sufferer is always either confessing his guilt to God, or, when he feels no guilt, challenging God in argument. David, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Job, and the nameless martyred and moribund of the Psalms, all strive and are loud under pain. Why was this Servant the unique and solitary instance of silence under suffering? Because he had a secret which they had not. It had been said of him: _My Servant shall deal wisely_ or _intelligently_, shall know what he is about. He had no guilt of his own, no doubts of his God. But he was conscious of the end God had in his pain, an end not to be served in any other way, and with all his heart he had given himself to it. It was not punishment he was enduring; it was not the throes of the birth into higher experience, which he was feeling: it was a Service he was performing,--a service laid on him by God, a service for man's redemption, a service sure of results and of glory. Therefore _as a lamb to the slaughter is led, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, he opened not his mouth_.