Bible Commentaries

Personal Prophecies

Isaiah 2:1-5

This chapter opens with a very energetic and graphic expression, namely, "The word that Isaiah... saw." There are two most noticeable facts: the first is the testimony of a man whose name is given; and, secondly, here is an indication of the sense—namely, sight—by which the revelation was perceived. We have a living witness and an eye-witness. These are not anonymous prophecies; they are not papers that were found in the morning before the dew had gone up which had been shed from dark heavens in the night-time: the prophecies are associated with men, special men—men whose names are given, and they have about them at least all the outward seeming of authentic testimony. Is it possible to see a "word"? Yes, in the highest exaltation of the mind. But what is possible to the highest reverie of the soul is impossible to cold thought On this account a good deal of controversy has arisen as to prophecies and prophets, and the meaning of exalted sentiments and arguments. The difference between the prophet and the controversialist accounts for it all: the prophet was in the highest mental or spiritual excitement, his soul was ecstatic; he realised his highest and grandest self, and in an hour of transanimation he saw, he heard, he beheld the farther distances, and distinctly overheard the farther music. The controversialist comes upon the level ground, well fed, cold in temperament, cynically critical, and looks at everything through earthly mediums, or at best through literary mediums, and he pronounces the prophet wrong, whereas it was his own spiritual temperature that was below the occasion: he was not in the atmosphere in which souls live that use divine words.

The revelation was personal, and no religion is worth any consideration that does not identify itself with actual personal experience. Produce the Isaiah that "saw" the word, and let us see him. That is what Christianity does every day—it produces the Christian. Who says that this world shall be saved? This man says so: we give you his name, his address, his antecedents, his character; he is a man who has a reputation to lose, and he says that having been saved himself he has come to see that by the necessity of that action all men must be brought sooner or later under the same renewing, transfiguring, and sanctifying influence. A famous argument was set up long ago to the effect that a revelation could only come to one Isaiah 2:2).

Though ecstatic, Isaiah is still rational; though animated as with a thousand lives, he still lays hold of great philosophies as within the sweep of a noble benevolence. Let us see what has to happen. "The mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains." Consider what that prediction meant in Isaiah's time. He lived within well-defined boundaries and limitations: the Jew was not a great man in the sense of including within his personal aspirations all classes, conditions, and estates of men; left to himself he could allow the Gentiles to die by thousands daily without shedding a tear upon their fallen bodies; he lived amongst his own people; it was enough for him that the Jews were happy, for the Gentiles were but dogs. Here is a new view of human nature, a great enlargement of spiritual boundaries. Whenever you find this universal element coming into a man's thought and language he is under the noblest influences; he is escaping tradition; he is getting away from narrowness, and prejudice, and littleness: he has identified himself with the broadest fortunes of the common world. By so much, therefore, is this high animation of Isaiah proved to be but a noble aspect of reason itself: it is reason on fire, reason transfigured, reason divinely possessed, and radiant at every point.

How does the witness proceed? We find that the worship, according to the third verse, is to be associated with teaching. "He will teach us of his ways." So the elevation of mind does not transcend the limits of education. Man does not invent his religion or his morality; he is taught of God. But being the subject of teaching he is of necessity the subject of continual change and advancement. Then, first, he should be most humble, for he yet is conscious of ignorance in many directions; then, secondly, he should be most reverent, for he cannot teach himself, but is to be taught by the ministry of the Holy One. We are all at school. Woe betide us when we think our education perfect! "Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ" Observe, "in the knowledge" of him: there is more to be known about him, more to be comprehended of his Isaiah 2:4).

How high Isaiah must have been even in imagination when he foresaw that possibility! It is easy for us now to take up these words and set them to chanting music, but what was it for the first speaker to deliver them? How he must have been rent in his very soul by an uncontrollable and maddening joy, when he caught sight of that dawn which brought with it the reign of peace, the sovereignty of love! Consider the age of these words: let those who find fault with the Bible attack the Bible at its strongest points. This is one of them, that a man thousands of years ago should have anticipated the song of the angels, should have seen the day of Christ afar off, and been glad with all the quietness and joy of a Christian sabbath. We look back, the prophets looked forward, and because the things they saw were in such startling contrast to the things they felt near them, surely their faith was tried: because what appeared to them was clothed with the nature of impossibility. This is the very song of the angels: "Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more": "Peace on earth, and good will toward men." Here is a prediction of arbitration in case of war—"He... shall rebuke many people." Read the word "rebuke"—He shall arbitrate amongst many people: he shall hear their cause; he shall redress their grievances; he shall determine their controversies, and men shall accept his award as final. And here is peace as the final goal. See the forge lighted; see the smith blowing his bellows; see him putting into his fire the sword and making it into a plowshare, and thrusting in the spear and beating it into a pruninghook. That is Christianity! Every sword that is sheathed to be taken out no more is a Christian argument completed. Every bad institution torn down and levelled with the dust is a proof that Christ was the Son of God. Every child taken off the street, and put into a public school, and educated at the public expense as a member of the commonwealth and an element in the social confederacy, is an answer to the Lord's prayer. But whilst Christendom makes swords and spears, Christendom is theoretically Christian but practically atheistic. What a projection of mind was here on the part of Isaiah: in his day the sword was the signal of power, the spear was greater than the sceptre, the warrior was the applauded Isaiah 2:5).

That is the only preparation for further revelation. Walking in the light, we shall receive increase of illumination; thankful for the morning dawn, we shall see the noontide splendour; faithful in a little, we shall be entrusted with much; honest children of the twilight, we shall yet see things in their largest and grandest reality. If we do the will, we shall know the doctrine. Blessed is that servant who shall be found waiting, watching, working when his Lord cometh, for his Lord shall entrust him with ampler riches.

Isaiah has been called the evangelical prophet: are there any traces of his title to this high designation within the compass of this text? Let us see. He speaks in the second verse of all nations flowing unto the house of the Lord: where do we find the expression "all nations" in the Gospels? We find it in the very lips of Christ—"All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations." Christ's is a national religion; it takes up empires, and provinces, and continents, and worlds, and ages; it is the infinite faith. Isaiah 2:2-4, it should be premised, recur with slight variations in the fourth chapter of Isaiah 2:5-9). And then in one of his stateliest periods Isaiah declares the judgment about to fall upon all that is "tall and lofty," upon Uzziah's towers and fortified walls, upon the great merchant ships at Elath, upon every object of human satisfaction and pride, when wealth and rank will be impotent to save, when idols will be cast despairingly aside, and when all classes alike will be glad to find a hiding-place, as in the old days of Midianite invasion or Philistine oppression ( Judges 6:2; 1 Samuel 13:6), in the clefts and caves of the rocks."—Rev. Canon Driver, D.D.

Divine Accusations

Isaiah 2:6-16

This paragraph is charged with the old complaint against the nominal people of God. They could not live within their appointed boundaries; it seemed to be impossible for them to be content with the divinely-erected altar; they must needs enter into foreign alliances, and into relations with strangers whose religion was calculated to debase the intellect and to deprave the heart. This is the charge of the sixth verse: The people of God were replenished from the east, and had become soothsayers like the Philistines; they pleased themselves in the children of strangers. They were cloud-diviners; they were looking about for sights, omens, signs, wonders; they were trying to make revelations—as we should say, Bibles—for themselves, and their inventions brought upon them coldness of heart and forsakenness by the divine Father. This is no ancient lapse; we are not exhuming the history of the world whilst dwelling upon such apostasies: who is content with his own religion? Who is there into whose heart there does not come now and again a subtle suggestion that he can enlarge the revelation he has, that he can find out something for himself, that if he continues to peruse the clouds he may see there some omens which he may dignify with the name of divine appearances? We cannot be content with the book; we want to write a second volume, to add something, at least a footnote of our own, that we may see the work of our own inventiveness and ingenuity.

How difficult is discipline in every department of life! How hard is it to keep to the strict and well-defined line, and to subdue the energy of invention, and to say to that curious and marvellous power within us which would do something on its own account to amend the ways of providence, and enlarge the scope of Isaiah 2:7-8).

Observe how the sequence runs: money in abundance: money will buy horses, and horses stand for power: horses will need chariots, and chariots mean dash, speed, ostentation—money, horses, chariots, can men end there? They cannot; and given money, horses, chariots, without a corresponding sanctification, without the inworking of that spirit of self-control which expresses the action of the Holy Ghost, and you compel men to go farther and to fill their land with idols. The sequence cannot be broken. Men may have money, horses, chariots, and the true God; but when men have money, horses, chariots, and no god that is true, they will make gods for themselves, for they must eke out their ostentation by some sort of nominal piety. Men will build churches; men must have religious rites and ceremonies; and what can suit the worldly man better than an idol that takes no notice of him, a wooden deity that never troubles him with its disciplinary obligations? What is worse for any land than unsanctified prosperity? Who can trust himself beyond a given point with the riches and honours of this world? How they enkindle evil fires! how they madden human ambition! how they cause the man to become boastful, imperious, overbearing, and oppressive! Who has not had some little experience of this? Some men can carry more of the world's riches than others, and yet retain their modesty; but wherever money, horses, chariots come, without corresponding moral discipline and chastening, there must be an issue in idolatry. Who can be quite content without some form of religion? Strangely and inexplicably, some men's religion is unbelief. They protest so much against belief that they are obliged to make a kind of deity of their unbelief. They are proud of it, and yet they are conscious of the weakness of their position; they fill up with hollow laughter that which is wanting in solidity and continuity of argument. Somewhere, somehow, in some form, every man will have a religion beyond himself, and that religion will either be faith, or unbelief; God, or mammon; the living Father, or the deaf and dumb idols of man's own making.

What then comes? Universal apostasy in the land:—

"And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself" ( Isaiah 2:9).

Apostasy is not partial, it is universal. That is the case with the world as God views it. When the world left him, according to the evangelical conception, it went altogether. God looked from heaven to see if there were any righteous, and he said, There is none righteous, no, not one: they are altogether corrupt: they have turned out of the way: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. A marvellous action is this of moral apostasy! It drags down whole worlds with it; it troubles every section of every province in God's empire; it troubles the judgment, the conscience, the imagination, the will; it makes every appetite an open mouth which devours things that are good, and destroys qualities that are holy. So it is with the individual character. You do not find a man recognised by the divine judgment as good in parts, that is to say, good in his judgment, but bad in his will; excellent in taste, but avaricious and worldly and self-promoting. The Lord does not adopt that species of criticism; the judgment of God is not eclectic, taking an excellence here and pointing out a default there; the Lord looketh on the heart, and when the heart goes it goes altogether, in one tremendous swing, in one awful plunge. Pray for the heart; say, Lord, save my poor heart! Sometimes it wants to turn away from the light and to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; sometimes it is weary with the paradise of thy grace and love, and it yearns to spend a night in the wilderness of its own passions: Lord, pity me, for the very atmosphere weighs upon me like a burden, and life is a mystery of pain. It takes all such prayer to save a man in the extremities of temptation. Sometimes he must be nothing but prayer; he must be an embodied supplication, an incarnate cry. Only they know this who have felt the devil's grip, who have felt the nearness of hell's burning, and who know how terrific a thing it is for the heart to be set on fire from below. One man cannot set himself against another in this matter. "The mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself:" the great man cannot stand aside, and say, I am not as others; the mean man cannot say, This is the lot only of those who are weak, and I must blame my circumstances for my apostasy. The mean man and the great Isaiah 2:11-12).

How poor is man when he is contrasted with that right quality! How great when compared with himself! Some men tall, others short of stature; some men wise, others not wise; some rich, others poor; some very great, and others obscure and insignificant and nothing accounted of; judged amongst themselves, all these comparisons are legitimate and are significant, but when man is set side by side with the God that made him, how are the lofty crushed down, how are the mighty brought into conscious weakness, how are all inequalities levelled in one pitiable and impotent monotony! That is the right standard of judgment. Comparing ourselves amongst ourselves we become wise; but comparing ourselves with the righteousness of God we are ashamed of our morality, and we even withdraw our prayers from divine attention. When the Lord ariseth to shake terribly the earth, what can men do? We have had such visitations, call them natural phenomena if you like, the argument still remains intact—what can man do even in the hour of the manifestation of "natural phenomena," if we like that phrase better than "the visitation of God"? Is the situation eased by describing an earthquake as a natural phenomenon? What can the judges do then, robed and seated in elevated positions, reading with piercing eyes the law of the country—what can they say when the court rocks to and fro because of the upheaval of the earth? What can the soldier do when the earth trembles under his feet? Helmeted with shield and spear, and all the panoply of war upon him, what can he do? Where is the sword that can strike an earthquake? where is the spear that can affright a natural phenomenon, and make it an obedient slave? What is the difference between a military commander and the frailest life that flutters at the grave's edge, even under the visitation of a "natural phenomenon"? By eliminating the word "God" you do not get rid of the natural phenomenon; by seizing that word and turning it to its finest uses, you may have peace and comfort even when the mountains are removed into the midst of the sea; but you do not get rid of the pain, peril, mystery, and whole possibility of ruin simply by taking the word "God" out of the tragic mystery of nature.

Will God, then, alone be great in relation to man? No, his greatness will show itself everywhere: not only shall men be put down in their pride, but nature shall be dwarfed:—

"And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, and upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up" ( Isaiah 2:13-14).

Nature shall be dwarfed when the Lord ariseth to shake terribly the earth. All the worlds are in the hollow of his hand; all the constellations are but flecks of light; all the marvels of the stellar presences that enrich the sky and make a mystery of it are but as a drop of the bucket So man shall be brought low, and nature shall be humbled, and civilisation itself shall be abased:—

"And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, and upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures" ( Isaiah 2:15-16).

All shall go down in the tremendous cataclysm! Then shall men hold their idols in contempt—"The idols he shall utterly abolish." What! Will he not spare one of them? Not one. Not the golden ones? No. Not the proofs of human ingenuity and invention? No: he shall utterly abolish: he shall blow with his mouth, and they shall flee away; he shall shake his hand at them, and they shall appear no more. All this is not prophecy, but history. Here we have a case set forth in high religious terms, in almost poetic imagery; but the kernel is solid and true, and is part of our own experience to-day. Let us waive for a moment the idea of literal earthquakes. There are earthquakes of another kind, if we may so accommodate the expression. There have been times in our experience when mighty men have gone down, and lofty men have been brought low, and when cedar and oak were of no consequence to us, and when the idols we have praised and trusted the most we have the most detested: we have hidden them; we have put them out of the way; we have turned to look in some kind of cowardly manner for a fire into which we might thrust them; we have been ashamed of our false religions and our false confidences. We claim, therefore, that this is not a romantic passage, ancient Hebrew poetry, but that in the sub-tone of it it is historical, experimental, as modern as our own consciousness and the facts of our own life. What visitations we have had! What tremendous commercial upheavals! What shaking of social confidences! What distrust has been created in us regarding even the highest in the land! How we have seen the very props of society rotting before our vision, and how sometimes have we been inclined to pronounce all men vanity and lies! Again and again in history we have been made to see that man at his best estate is not to be trusted. "Cease ye from Isaiah 2:22

This is in the tone of Old Testament teaching. The prophets and psalmists were continually dwelling upon the frailty of man. By his proved frailty man is ruled out of court as a permanent security or defence. If he never died, or if he were always strong and always wise, then verily he might be accounted of. His mistakes are the convictions which have been proved against him, and he must bear the penalty of those mistakes. There is no man who does not himself need help; how then can any one man or any number of men be the inviolable sanctuary of all other life? There is a sense in which every man needs every other man, as a help, as a suggestion, as a temporary refuge. The argument of the text is founded upon the frailty of man. No reference is made to his intellectual ability or his moral sympathy. It is said that man's breath is in his nostrils, and therefore he is little to be accounted of. He does not know how soon he may be gone. In the very midst of his offer of help he himself may be cut down. Frailty has thus its moral uses as well as strength. What is common to humanity should be the teacher of the whole world. There is no man whose breath is not in his nostrils; there is no man whose time upon the earth is not appointed. In this respect there is nothing invidious in the dispensations of divine providence. From the king upon the throne to the meanest of his subjects there prevails one law of frailty and incertitude. We are not however to deal wholly with this aspect of frailty. Our very weakness is to turn our attention to the Source of power; because we are so weak ourselves we ought to ask, Where, then, can strength be found? Thus our sin drives us to penitence; our pain drives us to inquiry; our poverty cries out or the fulness of God. But because we are frail, or, in other words, because our strength is limited, that is no reason why we should deny service to others. In so far as in us lies let us place ourselves at the service of those who need us most. The child must cry out for its mother, the sufferer must pine for the physician. The weak man turns his eyes towards the brother who is stronger than himself. If, however, we seek one another only, we show that the spirit of true religiousness is not within us. We must cry out for the living God, and come early into his courts, and plead to be admitted to his presence; then our frailty will be supported by his almightiness. We are not made frail that we may be despised; we are made frail that we may, go to the Strong for strength.