Bible Commentaries

Isaiah 26:9

I. The Bible is pervaded by the teaching of events. Isaiah is the inspired writer who lays most stress on this teaching. He is full of a great fall which is to come some day to all human pride, of a great ruin in prospect. He writes with this vision always before his eyes, and this great distant judgment of the fall of the world colours his descriptions of intermediate lesser judgments and events. He looks upon everything from this point of view. Through all the overthrows of kings and armies, of cities and governments, of high towers and fenced walls, he hears the last trumpet sounding. He says that the end will come at last, and that in the meantime every catastrophe that takes place in the world is a type of it. Isaiah is thus a teacher from events—from the course of things here. He tells men such events ought to make them sober and serious in spite of themselves—to chasten their vanity and levity, and to subdue their pride.

II. Persons are apt too much to separate spirituality of mind from the teaching of ordinary life, and the lessons which the facts of this world convey. Undoubtedly the mind may be spiritualised without this teaching, and even before it can be had; at the same time, in the case of the great majority of men, the spiritual temper is not attained without this teaching. What a moral is there, for instance, in the fall of a great man! It puts us into a spiritual state of mind; it makes us, whether we will or no, religious for a short interval. The world thus rightly read and rightly apprehended becomes its own antidote. The world is the great tempter, but at the same time it is the great monitor. It is the great saddener, the great warner, the great prophet.

J. B. Mozley, Sermons Parochial and Occasional, p. 106.

References: Isaiah 26:9.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. i., No. 31. Isaiah 26:1—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. ii., p. 95. Isaiah 26:12.—H. Alfora, Quebec Chapel Sermons, vol. iii., p. 275. Isaiah 26:13.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. i.,p. 531.

Isaiah 26:19

This passage is very mystical; and it may be a much higher than Isaiah who speaks; for "the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy," and then the words will contain the deepest evangelical meaning. "Thy dead men shall live," Christ says to His Church. And why? What are the means? How is the process? "Together with my dead body shall they arise."

I. Mark the great truth that argument contains. The natural body of the Lord Jesus Christ rose visible upon the earth; but that visible body was the symbol of another body, as real, but invisible. Of that body Christ is the head, and all His are members.

II. St. Peter tells us that the restored life of the buried body owes itself to the same source as that which is the spring in this world of the life of the dead soul. The Holy Ghost is made known to us in this as in other of His offices under the emblem of the dew.

III. It has been said, that the best test of a man's character is how he wakes up in the morning. What a chorus of sweet melodies will that be, when every saint who has slept awakes to sing! Then shall we know what that means—the "song of Moses and the Lamb."

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons, 2nd series, p. 115.

References: Isaiah 26:19.—J. N. Norton, Old Paths, p. 252; Preacher's Monthly, vol. viii., p. 184. Isaiah 26:20.—J. M. Neale, Sermons on Passages from the Prophets, vol. i.. p. 78. Isaiah 26:20, Isaiah 26:21.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. iv., p. 355; H. P. Liddon, Old Testament Outlines, p. 186. 26—Parker, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxi., No. 168. Isaiah 27:3.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxv., No. 1464. Isaiah 27:5.—Preacher's Monthly, vol. vi., p. 255.