Looking round upon this spectacle of superstitious folly, the prophet declares that _all men are become too brute-like for knowledge_; too degraded to appreciate the truth, the simplicity of a higher faith; too besotted with the worship of a hundred vain idols, which were the outward reflexion of their own diseased imaginations, to receive the wisdom of the true religion, and to perceive especially the truth just enunciated, that it is Iahvah who gives the rain and upon whom all atmospheric changes depend (cf. xiv. 22): and thus, in the hour of need, _every founder blushes for the image, because his molten figure is a lie, and there is no breath in them_; because the lifeless idol, the work of his hands, can lend no help. Perhaps both clauses of the verse rather express a prophecy: _All men will be proven brutish, destitute of knowledge; every founder will blush for the graven image._ Wise and strong as the Babylonians supposed themselves to be, the logic of events would undeceive them. They were doomed to a rude awakening; to discover in the hour of defeat and surrender that the molten idol was a delusion, that the work of their hands was an embodied lie, void of life, powerless to save. _Vanity_--a mere breath, nought--_are they, a work of knaveries_ (a term recurring only in li. 18; the root seems to mean "to stammer," "to imitate"); _in the time of their visitation they will perish!_ or simply _they perish!_--in the burning temples, in the crash of falling shrines.
It has happened so. At this day the temples of cedar and marble, with their woodwork overlaid with bronze and silver and gold, of whose glories the Babylonian sovereigns so proudly boast in their still existing records, as "shining like the sun, and like the stars of heaven," are shapeless heaps or rather mountains of rubbish, where Arabs dig for building materials and treasure trove, and European explorers for the relics of a civilisation and a superstition which have passed away for ever. "Vana sunt, et opus risu dignum." In the revolutions of time, which are the outward measures of the eternally self-unfolding purposes of God, the word of the Judean prophets has been amply fulfilled. Babylon and her idols are no more.
All other idols, too, must perish in like manner. _Thus shall ye say of them: The gods who the_ heavens _and earth did not make, perish from the earth and from under the heavens shall these!_ The assertion that the idols of Babylon were doomed to destruction, was not the whole of the prophetic message. It is connected with and founded upon the antithetic assertion of the eternity of Iahvah. They will perish, but He endures. The one eternal is El Elyon, the Most High God, the Maker of heaven and earth. But heaven and earth and whatever partakes only of their material nature are also doomed to pass away. And in that day of the Lord, when the elements melt with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burnt up (2 Pet. iii. 10), not only will the idols of the heathen world, and the tawdry dolls which a degenerate church suffers to be adored as a kind of magical embodiment of the Mother of God, but all other idols which the sensebound heart of man makes to itself, vanish into nothingness before that overwhelming revelation of the supremacy of God.
There is something amazing in the folly of worshipping man, whether in the abstract form of the cultus of "Humanity," or in any of the various forms of what is called "Hero-worship," or in the vulgar form of self-worship, which is the religion of the selfish and the worldly. To ascribe infallibility to any mortal, whether Pope or politician, is to sin in the spirit of idolatry. The Maker of heaven and earth, and He alone, is worthy of worship. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding" (Job xxxviii. 4). No human wisdom nor power presided there; and to produce the smallest of asteroids is still a task which lies infinitely beyond the combined resources of modern science. Man and all that man has created is nought in the scale of God's creation. He and all the mighty works with which he amazes, overshadows, enslaves his little world, will perish and pass away; only that will survive which he builds of materials which are imperishable, fabrics of spiritual worth and excellence and glory (1 Cor. iii. 13). A Nineveh, a Babylon, a London, a Paris, may disappear; _but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever_ (1 John ii. 17). _Not like these_ (cf. verse 11 _ad fin._) _is Jacob's Portion, but the Maker and Moulder of the All--He is his heritage; Iahvah Sabaoth is His_ _name!_ (Both here and at li. 19 = xxviii. 19 the LXX. omits: _and Israel is the tribe_, which seems to have been derived from Deut. xxxii. 9. Israel is elsewhere called _Iahvah's heritage_, Ps. xxxiii. 12, and _portion_, Deut. xxxii. 9; but that thought hardly suits the connexion here.)