A sensibly different portion of the prophecy now opens on us. No longer is the overthrow of kings and peoples in the foreground; nor are we occupied as before with the various Gentile enemies that long beset and troubled Israel. Hence, most appropriately introducing it, stands a touching controversy between God and His own people. We are evidently not looking here on God's dealings without; we enter within. Thus judgment begins as ever at the house of God: and more closely and thoroughly than the same process in the preface of our prophecy. (Chap. 1) More was wanted than ways and judgments in providence. There are moral wants and spiritual wrongs which must be taken if the people are to be blessed according to God; and what makes the distinction so much the more striking is the fact that we shall find Babylon again in a totally different aspect from that which had been seen as yet, not so much in her aspect of worldly magnificence and power, but in her sad notoriety as the source and bulwark of idolatry on earth. Evidently this accords with God's pleading with His people, and His distinct unfolding of the chastening that He caused to light upon them because of their idolatry, and even worse spiritual sins, as we shall see. Thus not political but spiritual wickedness, is here before us: into which they had been drawn by the enemy, to set them into opposition to God Himself. And this gives rise to an altogether different character of revelation and even style of address “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” graciously lets us see the end of all. In the beginning of the book the Spirit of God appealed to Israel as the people then were, showing us God's judgment of their wickedness and the bringing in of the glory of the Lord. Here, too, the same Israel are guilty, and the glory of the Lord is to be established surely; but before we behold the distressing picture of what they really were in His eyes, He begins with sure words of comfort, so that the heart of every saint would be strengthened at the very outset with the assurance that they were the object of divine mercy, and thus would the better bear to hear what the Lord must tell them of their grievous faults.
The chapter before formed a kind of link with what follows; for there we had the prediction of their captivity to Babylon; which, as has been often remarked, bolds a peculiar place. Babylon being the beginning of the great image of Daniel, becomes also the type of the last. The head of gold received supremacy from God in a more direct form than any of the other powers, which were only successors in the line. The grant of imperial power was immediate from the God of heaven to Nebuchadnezzar, who thus typified in a certain sense the image from first to last. More particularly the fall of Babylon prefigured the overthrow of the world-power in the earth, and represented the final judgment of that system of universal supremacy than begun, and if not still going on, only suspended; for the image-power has not yet been struck by the stone, and is awaiting its re-organization before it is dissolved forever. Its components are at present in a broken state, but by and by they will again coalesce with an appearance of amazing and renewed strength, which its last head will use directly to oppose the Lord of lords and King of kings. This Rev. 17 clearly shows us; for the judgment of Babylon and the beast as there set forth is not yet accomplished.
Babylon has thus a special place as being the power of all others that was allowed to enslave Jerusalem, and the house of David, from whom the Deliverer of Israel was to spring. Now we know that this Son of David is actually come, that He was presented to Israel and rejected by them, that He suffered death on the cross, and is gone up to heaven, where He has taken His place, not as Son of David but as the rejected Son of man who is the Son of God. The Lord Jesus is there, the great high Priest of God as well as Head of the Church, seated at the right hand of God, where and whence He acts in power and love, sending down whatever is needful for the good of the saints and for the testimony of God here below. That is what Christ is now doing, not at all as yet fulfilling the prophecies of the Son of David as such. Hence anyone who takes up the Old Testament to find the full and clear announcement of what occupies Christ now, must either give up these prophecies as dark and unintelligible, or he must put a false gloss and violent strain on them to eke out such an application as their full scope. In truth they refer to the future, not to the present; and to Israel, God's earthly people; not to the heavenly Church, save in certain general principles or special allusions to the Gentile parenthesis, which the provident wisdom of the Holy Ghost took care to furnish in order to confound God's adversaries. Then there are displays of God in moral ways from which, though about Israel rather than ourselves, we can and ought to extract for our own souls that which is most helpful and cheering. For God is good, and full of tender mercy to Israel; and He is surely not less full of grace to us. If He is love to the people He will govern, can He love less the children He now adopts to Himself by Jesus Christ? There are, no doubt, great differences between the saints He calls now, and those who are to be blessed in the age to come. Now it is His Church, Christ's body, the children He is bringing into the place of heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ. Israel will inherit the promises made to the fathers; but we, if Christ's now, are heirs with the firstborn, not merely of “the fathers,” but of God the Father.
When we take up the prophecies thus, not biased with the foregone conclusion of finding ourselves in them, but simple and free to understand them as they are written, and the proper objects God was speaking of, nothing can be clearer or more certain. Here, for instance, He calls to comfort His people. The ground He puts it on is, that the warfare of Israel is over. The Lord now interposes. Bad as Jerusalem's sins were, she had to His reckoning of love, suffered double what her sins deserved. He is not looking at the sins of Jerusalem apart from Christ, but as it were through Him. If there were no suffering Messiah connected with Jerusalem, nothing would remain but her sins and their judgment. But God always looks at Christ for them and can thus say so, “Comfort ye, comfort ye.”
Next we have the manner in which the comfort will be brought home to them. Here we have a grave and interesting insight into God's ways. “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness.” The allusion is evident to John the Baptist, who was “sent from God” to bear witness of the true light and prepare a way for the Messiah. In the midst of his testimony he was slain. Messiah too came, and in the midst of His testimony He was slain. Master and servant, they were both cut off by wicked hands. Thus God's work was, as far as man could see nipped in the bud; and hence the world is yet in misrule, confusion, in sin and misery. When God really fulfills for the earth what He has at heart, there will be manifest power of blessing to His glory. But look up, not down, and read in the risen and glorified Christ the proof to faith that the cross, the very thing that seemed the total ruin of all the counsels of God, is in truth their eternal basis and justification, by which He is and will be forever glorified; the cross of the Lord Jesus is the triumph of grace, as the resurrection and ascension are its righteous answer; but it is a triumph known only to faith. The world sees not heaven opened nor Him who is there—saw in the cross One who suffered to death. In the Acts of the Apostles man's rejection of Christ is constantly contrasted with God's raising Him from the dead. Thus we see that man and God are in complete opposition. The cross is not thus looked at in the light of God's purposes, but of man's wickedness. In the epistles the truth chiefly insisted on is the cross, not so much as the crowning point of all man has done against God, but as the deepest exercise of the grace that God feels towards guilty man. Not that grace was created by the cross; it was in God before the coming of Christ, and because of it He sent His Son. The propitiation is the fruit of God's grace, not its cause. Propitiation vindicates it, judges and puts aside all the sin on man's part that otherwise would have proved an insurmountable barrier. But the love was on God's part from ever. lasting. We must bear this in mind in looking at propitiation, which indeed is the strongest possible proof of His love, while it equally proves His holiness and necessary judgment of our sins. John's testimony was a call to repentance in view of Messiah's advent: his baptism therefore was a confession both of sins and of Him who should come after himself. It was “the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,” not the person nor the work of Israel's Hope. But Israel as a whole was blind and deaf; the testimony was interrupted, the Messiah refused. There was therefore a twofold accomplishment, the people's unbelief thus intercepting and breaking off the thread of God's ways, while His counsels abide irrefragable, accomplished, through their unbelief, in the cross as they never else have been. The way of Jehovah was not yet prepared nor was there a straight-highway in the desert for God. Man was put on his responsibility and heard the cry only to sin; by and by God will make all good in grace by His own power. But every valley shall be exalted; every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain; and the glory of the LORD shall be revealed and all flesh (not Israel only) shell see it together; for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it. (Ver. 3-6.)
Thus plainly you have, as far as its scope goes, the sure purpose of God. Every difficulty, depths, heights, rough or smooth, all must disappear; for God yet means to make this earth the scene of His glory. A most blessed prospect it is, that the sin, misery, and weakness of man, the groaning of all creation around, the wiles and power and presence of Satan must vanish and give place not to the revealed grace of God in Christ, which has shone we know in the despised Nazarene, but to the revealed glory of Jehovah, when all flesh shall see it together. It cannot refer to the day of the judgment of the dead because it will not be “all flesh” nor any flesh whatever, but the dead raised before the great white throne. But here it is a question of man living in his natural body on the earth. The Jew was apt to overlook the judgment of the dead at the end of all dispensations; the Gentile is just as negligent as to the judgment of the quick, though it be confessed in the commonest symbols of Christendom. As infidelity increases, the rejection of this truth is, perhaps, more complete now, than ever since the gospel was preached to the Gentiles.
In the dark ages, people at least believed enough to be panic-struck from time to time; but now Christians are accounted fanatics if they testify of these coming judgments. But none the less will God cut short the course of this world, and the glory of the Lord be revealed, so that all flesh shall see it together. This John the Baptist had to announce; only the first word committed to him, and already accomplished in its measure, was the preparing the way of Jehovah. Hence I think that the third verse does not solely refer to the mighty changes of the new age, but includes also such a moral preparation as befitted the coming of the Lord in humiliation. Thus, for the time, it went no further than God's working in the hearts of a remnant, whose souls were made to be in a measure prepared for the Messiah. We know that such was the fact. See John's disciples leaving him to follow Jesus, and John delighting in it. “He must increase, but I must decrease.” Hence says our Lord in Matt. 11, “If ye will receive it, this was Elias that was for to come,” clearly showing that to faith, John the Baptist was Elias (compare Mark 9:11-13); but, as a matter of fact, the full predicted circumstances are postponed till the great day that is coming (compare Mal. 4). Thus he is to come, not before the Lord takes up the Church, with which he has nothing to do; but before the proper blessing of Israel, with whom he has a great deal to do. John the Baptist went before Jehovah-Jesus in the spirit and power of Elias; but Elias himself publicly vindicated the true God in opposition to the apostasy of Israel and to the discomfiture of the priests of Baal. He will return by and by, and resume a work of the most solemn character before the great and terrible day of the Lord. John Baptist anticipated this, in the way of preparing a remnant for receiving Him who should and did come.
Next, the “Voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry?” Here follows the substance of John the Baptist's testimony, though it may be still more manifest in the end of this age. “All flesh is grass.” It is man morally and universally. “And all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.” Could a man use this to think well of himself? Verse 7 cuts down all boasting— “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it.” It is not its beauty, but its frailty God refers to. The moment you have God testing its character, if it were only by the breath of His nostrils, all flesh comes to nothing; and this, too, in Israel, not in Gentiles only: “surely the people is grass.” Nor is this all; He utters its sentence again and again. The reason for the first repetition seems to be the emphatic judgment of “the people,” that is, the Jews. The second case is particularly connected with the resource for faith. “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever.” These two truths are of no less importance at the present moment, as we know how Peter used them for the Christian Jews from the first. They will be urgently needed when God begins to work in the Jews once more, when they painfully learn, feel, and prove the utter worthlessness of man as he is in divine things. Even now the men of the world are making no small strides; but they will do greater things; and the devil will mature and display his plans as they have never been witnessed in the world before; and what will be their security? “The word of our God shall stand forever.”
But as the Church really came to view, as the heavenly mystery of Christ, or rather part of it, when all hopes of the earth and man for the present (and always as far as they are concerned) were buried in Christ's grave, so I believe, as the end draws nearer, we do greatly need with simplicity to rest upon God's word. We may, as only knowing in part, understand but little, but it is a poor feeling and unworthy to be called faith, only to believe His word when understood. Not that it is not sweet and cheering when we consciously enter into any of its depths; but intelligence of the word is the gift of grace and product of faith, not the ground why I believe. God sends me His testimony and my soul bows to it, setting to my seal that God is true. Am I a sinner without peace or even hope, or any real anxiety before God? That word comes and pronounces to my conscience that all flesh is grass. My soul is laid bare. If I do not believe God, all my life and death will be just the proof of my folly and sin. But if I submit to the humbling yet gracious testimony of God, while proving its truth in what I am, I enter into the comfort and strength of His own word, and I, too, am made to stand through that same word. “The word of our God shall stand forever.” Our experience follows, and confirms, of course, the truth of the word; but breaking down and God's word is the only standing ground. Yet outwardly the word of God is just like the cross of Christ. There may well be difficulties, to such as we are; and it seems a weak thing to confide in for eternity; but, in truth, it is more stable than heaven and earth. So in 2 Timothy, the apostle, anticipating the ruin of Christendom, casts the man of God on this unfailing resource.
But we turn in the next verse to the special earthly object of God's affection—Zion. It is the symbol of the grace of God working in Israel, also the center of the royal glory that is about to be revealed in Israel. “O Zion that bringest good tidings,” &c., (9-11.) There can be no doubt, the Person who came of old and will come by and by, is Christ; in a word, the same Jesus is not only Christ but Jehovah. He is here spoken of as the God of Israel, Jehovah, whose reward is with Him and His work before Him. First of all, is His coming in power; next, with all tenderness of heart, as One taking compassion on them, because of their defenseless and exposed condition. Then (ver. 12 et seq.) when we come to inquire who this great and loving Deliverer is, He is no such mean conqueror as Rabbis dreamed of and the carnal desires of Israel so long clung to; He is the Creator. Even then it was God's warning of His judgment on the idolatry of Israel, which is the first great question in this part of Isaiah's prophecy. The people would follow the Gentiles in their following after idols. But before the Spirit of God deals with this iniquity, He first of all identifies the Messiah with God, and who and what He is, as the eternal and only wise Creator and Governor of all things. This accordingly gives an occasion for a glorious description of God. “Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counselor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and showed to him the way of understanding? Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing. And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof sufficient for a burnt offering. All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing, and vanity.” (Ver. 13-17.) Then He challenges the folly of those that set up graven images as His likeness. “To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him? The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains. He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved. Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: that bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown; yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and he shall also blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away as stubble. To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth.” (Ver. 18-26.) Lastly, He falls back on what He has been to His own from the beginning. “Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed over from my God? Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” (Ver. 27-31.) He cannot deny Himself, nor fail to strengthen the weakest that wait on Him.