The purging qualities of fire are often used symbolically to foretell Israel’s cleansing in the latter day. God’s judgments are a fire that will consume the wicked and purge the righteous. “And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined and will try them as gold is tried. They shall call upon my Name, and I will hear them, I will say it is my people and they shall say Jehovah is my God” (Zech. 13:9). “And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto Jehovah an offering in righteousness” (Mal. 3:3). The prophet’s vision of the angel cleansing his lips with a live coal, and the righteous remnant refined like silver and gold over the furnace, are correlative. Isaiah represents the righteous remnant, and they are symbolically purged with a flaming coal from the altar; in the future God will refine and purge the remnant of Israel.
Looking at the historical fact, the prophet is lifted out of his “undone,” “unclean,” condition, and sent with Jehovah’s message to the guilty men of Judah— “Go tell this people.” Even Moses at the burning bush shrank from being sent to Pharoah.
Here Isaiah, who had just bewailed his uncleanness, no sooner hears Jehovah saying “Whom shall I send? and who will go for us?” than he answers in the power of the Spirit, “Here am I: send me.” Cleansed from his iniquity, purged from his sin, he is empowered to bear Jehovah's words. What efficacy in that live coal!
But the time is coming when not merely a cleansed individual, though a prophet and representative withal, shall be the Lord's messenger, but a chosen remnant who are also called His brethren (Matt. 25:31 &c.), not to Judah who hearing shall not hear, and seeing shall not perceive, nor understand, but also on whom God's heavy judgment must fall. These future messengers carry a different message to a different people; they preach the King and invite to the kingdom. Then it will be good news of the kingdom and blessing for those that receive it. But the message by the prophet is a decree of judgment, the shutting, for a time, of the door of mercy. The people, as a nation, are set aside. “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.” Judah, like Ephraim, is given up.
Seasons of merciful interposition may yet be given after the judgment is decreed. And though the judgment is pronounced, this does not prevent God's promise of His Son even to “that king Ahaz,” not for the sake of the guilty people, but for the sake of the righteous. They thought that if king Uzziah was a leper, then all was ruined; but the promise reveals the King that is coming, of Whose kingdom there should be no end. The glory and magnificence of this promise may have been but dimly seen and felt, but there was strength and cheer for them. God knew how to comfort, and reveal His own purpose; and He has ever known how to provide and care for His own individual sheep while carrying on His great purpose of redemption, or taking vengeance on His enemies. With Him is neither variableness nor shadow of turning; for when Sodom was destroyed, not having ten righteous men within its gates, God did provide for the safety of one, and Zoar, a little city, was spared for his sake. And the Lord Jesus says that the days of great tribulation shall be shortened for the elect's sake. God controls and guides the storm for their sake. Worse and fiercer the storm of sin during the first of Manasseh's reign, and mingled with the predicted judgment under the sons of Josiah; yet what a merciful and blessed season the righteous had in the times of Hezekiah, and of Josiah! God provided an ark for Noah, spared Zoar for Lot's sake, and now calls upon His people, His elect, to enter into their chambers until the indignation be overpast (Isa. 26:20).
The bright seasons in the reign of Hezekiah and of Josiah were to sustain the faith and cheer the hearts of the righteous, not to set aside or annul the judgment. Even Josiah's tender heart and piety could do no more than bring him peace in his own day. But the judgment would surely come in his son's day. If the people could and would have heard and seen and understood, who is to say that it could not then have been, as it will be when the words of the psalmist are made good to Israel in the coming day? “And He remembered for them His covenant, and repented according to the multitude of His mercies” (Psa. 106:45). But the prophet enters into the mind of God and does not pray that the judgment may be averted, nor for forgiveness as Solomon did, that God would hear from the heaven of heavens, and, when He heard, forgive. The people were to be deprived of contrite hearts and broken spirits (to which God pledged Himself to look), lest they should be converted. The prophet recognizes the righteous judgment, and merely asks “How long” this unparalleled judgment is to last. And the irrevocable answer is “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, and Jehovah have removed men far away and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land” (Isa. 6:11). But the judgment is not yet past; the land is desolate, for Israel's blindness is not yet removed. When the veil is taken away, they will turn to the Lord (2 Cor. 3), their enemies shall be destroyed, and the waste cities shall be inhabited (Isa. 54:1-10).
But all through this time of wrath the line is preserved among them, even as the seed remains in an oak or a teil tree that is stripped of its leaves, cut down, and only a stump remaining; through the scent of water it will yet bear boughs like a plant (cf. Job 14:7). How small the remnant at the time of the Babylonish captivity! If the oak tree was shorn of its leaves then, nothing but the stump is left now.
“High-minded” Christendom, looking at the scattered people, exclaims in unbelief akin to derision, “Can these dry bones live”? Yea, whether looked at as dry bones, there will be the shaking and the breath from the four winds, and they will stand up an exceeding great army; or whether as the stump of the tree but whose substance (life) is in it, the scent of water will cause it again to bear boughs. Among the stricken mass of captives that Nebuchadnezzar brought to Babylon, there were Daniel and his three friends, and others doubtless; and they were kept from Babylon's idolatry. And in due time Ezra and Nehemiah appear, and bring back to Judea the “tenth” that the prophet speaks of. For this “tenth” is by no means significative of the godly remnant, but of the portion of Judah that should historically bear the name of Jews; “tenth” used indefinitely as a small portion compared with the nation. The “tenth” it was that crucified the Lord and so more guilty than those of Manasseh's day, or in the days of Josiah's sons. But they shall be eaten, consumed, or devoured a second time. God's righteous remnant were in their midst but really the life was in the godly ones. The holy seed was in them, but they had dwindled down to a very small number when the Lord Jesus came, such as Zacharias, Elizabeth, Anna, Mary and others that followed Him. But the grace and truth that came by Him was like the scent of water that Job speaks of. There were goodly boughs from the stump of Judah, shooting over the wall. But Judah, the returned “tenth,” rejected Him, and the leprosy of (Uzziah seemed evermore fixed on them, and so it would be but for the wisdom and power of God. For the leprosy that smote the people typically in Uzziah will be cleansed by Him Who had but to touch and say “I will: be thou clean;” and in the future, as in the past, the leprosy will immediately depart.