Then the swift thought turns, and returns again. The prophecies _have_ foretold an evangelical utterance to the whole human world. Not only in explicit prediction do they do so, but in the "mystic glory" of their more remote allusions. [Sidenote: Ver. 18.] =But I say, Did they not hear?= Was this failure of belief due to a limitation of the messenger's range in the plan of God? =Nay, rather, "Unto all the earth went out their tone, and to the ends of man's world (ἡ οἰκουμένη) their utterances"= (Psal. xix. 4). The words are the voice of that Psalm where the glories of the visible heavens are collocated with the glories of the Word of God. The Apostle hears more than Nature in the Sunrise Hymn of David; he hears grace and the Gospel in the deep harmony which carries the immortal melody along. The God who meant the skies, with their "silent voices," to preach a Creator not to one race but to all, meant also His Word to have no narrower scope, preaching a Redeemer. Yes, and there were articulate predictions that it should be so, as well as starry parables; predictions too that shewed the prospect not only of a world evangelized, but of an Israel put to shame by the faith of pagans. [Sidenote: Ver. 19.] =But I say= (his rapid phrase meets with an anticipating answer the cavil yet unspoken) =did not Israel know?= Had they no distinct forewarning of what we see to-day? =First comes Moses, saying,[180]= in his prophetic Song, sung at the foot of Pisgah (Deut. xxxii. 21), "=I=--the '_I_' is emphatic; the Person is THE LORD, and the action shall be nothing less than His--=I will take a no-nation to[181] move your jealousy; to move your anger I will take a nation non-intelligent";= a race not only not informed by a previous revelation, but not trained by thought upon it to an insight into new truth. And what Moses indicates, Isaiah, standing later in the history, indignantly explains: [Sidenote: Ver. 20.] =But Isaiah dares anything (ἀποτολμᾷ), and says= (lxv. 1), ="I was found by those who sought not Me; manifest I became to those who consulted not Me."[182]= [Sidenote: Ver. 21.] =But as to Israel he says,= in the words next in order in the place (lxv. 2), ="All the day long I spread my hands open,= to beckon and to embrace, =towards a people disobeying and contradicting."=
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So the servant brings his sorrows for consolation to--may we write the words in reverence?--the sorrows of his Master. He mourns over an Athens, an Ephesus, and above all over a Jerusalem, that "will not come to the Son of God, that they might have life" (John v. 40). And his grief is not only inevitable; it is profoundly right, wise, holy. But he need not bear it unrelieved. He grasps the Scripture which tells him that his LORD has called those who would not come, and opened the eternal arms for an embrace--to be met only with a contradiction. He weeps, but it is as on the breast of Jesus as He wept over the City. And in the double certainty that the Lord has felt such grief, and that He is THE LORD, he yields, he rests, he is still. "The King of the Ages" (1 Tim. i. 17) and "the Man of Sorrows" are One. To know Him is to be at peace even under the griefs of the mystery of sin.
[167] We thus attempt to convey the force of μέν.
[168] So read; not "_for Israel_."
[169] Cp. 1 Pet. i. 2; εἰς ὑπακοὴν ... Ἰησοῦ Χριτοῦυ; an "_obedience_" which means the decisive _submission_ of the sinner to the Saviour's _method of mercy_.
[170] Ὁ ποιήσας: the aorist sums up acts into a single idea of action.
[171] Ἐν αὐτῇ: "_in the righteousness_"; such seems to be the true reading. To "_live in_" a righteousness is to live as it were surrounded, guaranteed, by it.