Bible Commentaries

ISRAEL A UNITING BOND

‘In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt into Assyria.’

Isaiah 19:23

I. In the prophet’s view the three ancient foes, Egypt, Assyria, and Israel, are to be friends and allies, a blessing to all the earth, because they themselves have been blessed by God. Assyria and Egypt have passed away, and neither ever became worshippers of the true God. How then are we to understand this prophecy? I think that in this prophecy we have to distinguish between the religious and moral truths revealed by God to prophets, and the form in which the prophets expressed them. God revealed the principles and laws by which He ordered the government of the world. These great spiritual and moral laws were applied by the prophets themselves to the affairs of the Jewish and other nations. Isaiah understood that the God of Israel was the only God, and would at last be known to all the kingdoms of the earth. Egypt perished, Assyria perished, but the prophet had given a true testimony. God was not the God of the Jews only, but of all men.

II. It does not appear that any serious effort was made by the Jews to bring other nations to worship God.—The book of Jonah is to my mind an imaginative story, with some slight substratum of historic fact, intended to rebuke the indifference of the Jews to the condition of the world outside. We have no evidence that the rebuke produced the least effect.

Professor Max Müller divided the religions of the world into the class opposed to missions—Judaism, Brahminism, and the religion of Zoroaster—and those which have always had the missionary spirit in them, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. The non-missionary religions were dead, the others were still alive. The proselytes of Judaism were made without any formal missionary effort, Christianity was missionary from its very origin. The coming of Christ was the revelation of the love of God for the human race.

III. The Gospel is plainly a gospel for all mankind.—There is not a man among the vast populations of heathen cities, or among the wandering tribes of tropical countries, or living a cheerless life on the shores of Arctic seas, who might not claim for himself all the spiritual blessings which have been revealed in the lives of the greatest saints.

Complete indifference to the religious state of others is impossible to a really Christian man. We begin to pray for the salvation of others as soon as we begin to pray for our own.

As our love for others extends beyond our own family and our own country, we shall have the same kind of solicitude for the salvation of men in heathen lands as for the salvation of our own flesh and blood. The old Jewish exclusiveness has not died out. It is as hard, as mean, as unloving as ever. Let us care for our country, it says, and leave other races to their lower symbols of the Eternal and the Divine. That is false as a philosophy, it is simply demoniacal as a law of Christian conduct. The Christian Gospel is not the growth of our civilisation. It comes as a revelation direct from God, and so is suited for every nation.