Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 21

Now compare all this with the Psalms of Christian hope; with the faith that fills Paul; with his ardour who says, _To me to depart is far better_; with the glory which John beholds with open face: the hosts of the redeemed praising G.o.d and walking in the light of His face, all the geography of that country laid down, and the plan of the new Jerusalem declared to the very fas.h.i.+on of her stones; with the audacity since of Christian art and song: the rapture of Watts' hymns and the exhilaration of Wesley's praise as they contemplate death; and with the joyful and exact antic.i.p.ations of so many millions of common men as they turn their faces to the wall. In all these, in even the Book of the Revelation, there is of course a great deal of pure fancy. But imagination never bursts in anywhither till fact has preceded. And it is just because there is a great fact standing between us and Hezekiah that the pureness of our faith and the richness of our imagination of immortality differ so much from his. That fact is Jesus Christ, His resurrection and ascension. It is He who has made all the difference and brought life and immortality to light.

And we shall know the difference if we lose our faith in that fact. For _except Christ be risen from the dead_ and gone before to a country which derives all its reality and light for our imagination from that Presence, which once walked with us in the flesh, there remains for us only Hezekiah's courage to make the best of a short reprieve, only Hezekiah's outlook into Hades when at last we turn our faces to the wall. But to be stronger and purer for having met with death, as he was, only that we must afterwards succ.u.mb, with our purity and our strength, to death--this is surely to be, as Paul said, _of all men the most miserable_.

Better far to own the power of an endless life, which Christ has sealed to us, and translate Hezekiah's experience into the new calculus of immortality. If to have faced death as he did was to inherit dignity and peace and sense of power, what glory of kings.h.i.+p and queens.h.i.+p must sit upon those faces in the other world who have been at closer quarters still with the King of terrors, and through Christ their strength have spoiled him of his sting and victory! To have felt the worst of death and to have triumphed--this is the secret of the peaceful hearts, unfaltering looks and faces of glory, _which pa.s.s in solemn procession of wors.h.i.+p_ through all eternity before the throne of G.o.d.

We shall consider the Old Testament views of a future life and resurrection more fully in chaps. xxvii. and x.x.x. of this volume.

CHAPTER XXVI.

HAD ISAIAH A GOSPEL FOR THE INDIVIDUAL?

The two narratives, in which Isaiah's career culminates--that of the Deliverance of Jerusalem (x.x.xvi.; x.x.xvii.) and that of the Recovery of Hezekiah (x.x.xviii.; x.x.xix.)--cannot fail, coming together as they do, to suggest to thoughtful readers a striking contrast between Isaiah's treatment of the community and his treatment of the individual, between his treatment of the Church and his treatment of single members. For in the first of these narratives we are told how an illimitable future, elsewhere so gloriously described by the prophet, was secured for the Church upon earth; but the whole result of the second is the gain for a representative member of the Church of a respite of fifteen years.

Nothing, as we have seen, is promised to the dying Hezekiah of a future life; no scintilla of the light of eternity sparkles either in Isaiah's promise or in Hezekiah's prayer. The net result of the incident is a reprieve of fifteen years: fifteen years of a character strengthened, indeed, by having met with death, but, it would sadly seem, only in order to become again the prey of the vanities of this world (chap.

x.x.xix.). So meagre a result for the individual stands strangely out against the perpetual glory and peace a.s.sured to the community. And it suggests this question: Had Isaiah any real gospel for the individual?

If so, what was it?

First of all, we must remember that G.o.d in His providence seldom gives to one prophet or generation more than a single main problem for solution. In Isaiah's day undoubtedly the most urgent problem--and Divine problems are ever practical, not philosophical--was the continuance of the Church upon earth. It had really got to be a matter of doubt whether a body of people possessing the knowledge of the true G.o.d, and able to transfuse and transmit it, could possibly survive among the political convulsions of the world, and in consequence of its own sin. Isaiah's problem was the reformation and survival of the Church. In accordance with this, we notice how many of his terms are collective, and how he almost never addresses the individual. It is the _people_, upon whom he calls--_the nation, Israel, the house of Jacob My vineyard, the men of Judah His pleasant plantation_. To these we may add the apostrophes to the city of Jerusalem, under many personifications: _Ariel, Ariel, inhabitress of Zion, daughter of Zion_. When Isaiah denounces sin, the sinner is either the whole community or a cla.s.s in the community, very seldom an individual, though there are some instances of the latter, as Ahaz and Shebna. It is _This people hath rejected_, or _The people would not_. When Jerusalem collapsed, although there must have been many righteous men still within her, Isaiah said, _What aileth thee that all belonging to thee have gone up to the housetops?_ (xxii. 1). His language is wholesale. When he is not attacking society, he attacks cla.s.ses or groups: _the rulers_, the land-grabbers, the drunkards, _the sinners_, _the judges_, _the house of David_, _the priests and the prophets_, _the women_. And the sins of these he describes in their social effects, or in their results upon the fate of the whole people; but he never, except in two cases, gives us their individual results. He does not make evident, like Jesus or Paul, the eternal damage a man's sin inflicts on his own soul.

Similarly when Isaiah speaks of G.o.d's grace and salvation the objects of these are again collective--_the remnant; the escaped_ (also a collective noun); a _holy seed_; a _stock_ or _stump_. It is a _restored nation_ whom he sees under the Messiah, the perpetuity and glory of a _city_ and _a State_. What we consider to be a most personal and particularly individual matter--the forgiveness of sin--he promises, with two exceptions, only to the community: _This people that dwelleth therein hath its iniquity forgiven_. We can understand all this social, collective and wholesale character of his language only if we keep in mind his Divinely appointed work--the substance and perpetuity of a purified and secure Church of G.o.d.

Had Isaiah then no gospel for the individual? This will indeed seem impossible to us if we keep in view the following considerations:--

1. ISAIAH HIMSELF had pa.s.sed through a powerfully individual experience.

He had not only felt the solidarity of the people's sin--_I dwell among a people of unclean lips_--he had first felt his own particular guilt: _I am a man of unclean lips_. One who suffered the private experiences which are recounted in chap. vi.; whose _own eyes_ had _seen_ the _King, Jehovah of hosts_; who had gathered on his own lips his guilt and felt the fire come from heaven's altar by an angelic messenger specially to purify him; who had further devoted himself to G.o.d's service with so thrilling a sense of his own responsibility, and had so thereby felt his solitary and individual mission--he surely was not behind the very greatest of Christian saints in the experience of guilt, of personal obligation to grace and of personal responsibility. Though the record of Isaiah's ministry contains no narratives, such as fill the ministries of Jesus and Paul, of anxious care for individuals, could he who wrote of himself that sixth chapter have failed to deal with men as Jesus dealt with Nicodemus, or Paul with the Philippian gaoler? It is not picturesque fancy, nor merely a reflection of the New Testament temper, if we realize Isaiah's intervals of relief from political labour and religious reform occupied with an attention to individual interests, which necessarily would not obtain the permanent record of his public ministry. But whether this be so or not, the sixth chapter teaches that for Isaiah all public conscience and public labour found its necessary preparation in personal religion.

2. But, again, Isaiah had an INDIVIDUAL FOR HIS IDEAL. To him the future was not only an established State; it was equally, it was first, a glorious king. Isaiah was an Oriental. We moderns of the West place our reliance upon inst.i.tutions; we go forward upon ideas. In the East it is personal influence that tells, persons who are expected, followed and fought for. The history of the West is the history of the advance of thought, of the rise and decay of inst.i.tutions, to which the greatest individuals are more or less subordinate. The history of the East is the annals of personalities; justice and energy in a ruler, not political principles, are what impress the Oriental imagination. Isaiah has carried this Oriental hope to a distinct and lofty pitch. The Hero whom he exalts on the margin of the future, as its Author, is not only a person of great majesty, but a character of considerable decision. At first only the rigorous virtues of the ruler are attributed to Him (chap. xi. 1 ff.), but afterwards the graces and influence of a much broader and sweeter humanity (x.x.xii. 2). Indeed, in this latter oracle we saw that Isaiah spoke not so much of his great Hero, as of what any individual might become. _A man_, he says, _shall be as an hiding-place from the wind_. Personal influence is the spring of social progress, the shelter and fountain force of the community. In the following verses the effect of so pure and inspiring a presence is traced in the discrimination of individual character--each man standing out for what he is--which Isaiah defines as his second requisite for social progress.

In all this there is much for the individual to ponder, much to inspire him with a sense of the value and responsibility of his own character, and with the certainty that by himself he shall be judged and by himself stand or fall. _The worthless person shall be no more called princely, nor the knave said to be bountiful._

3. If any details of character are wanting in the picture of Isaiah's Hero, they are supplied by HEZEKIAH'S SELF-a.n.a.lYSIS (chap. x.x.xviii.). We need not repeat what we have said in the previous chapter of the king's appreciation of what is the strength of a man's character, and particularly of how character grows by grappling with death. In this matter the most experienced of Christian saints may learn from Isaiah's pupil.

Isaiah had then, without doubt, a gospel for the individual; and to this day the individual may plainly read it in his book, may truly, strongly, joyfully live by it--so deeply does it begin, so much does it help to self-knowledge and self-a.n.a.lysis, so lofty are the ideals and responsibilities which it presents. But is it true that Isaiah's gospel is for this life only?

Was Isaiah's silence on the immortality of the individual due wholly to the cause we have suggested in the beginning of this chapter--that G.o.d gives to each prophet his single problem, and that the problem of Isaiah was the endurance of the Church upon earth? There is no doubt that this is only partly the explanation.

The Hebrew belonged to a branch of humanity--the Semitic--which, as its history proves, was unable to develop any strong imagination of, or practical interest in, a future life apart from foreign influence or Divine revelation. The pagan Arabs laughed at Mahommed when he preached to them of the Resurrection; and even to-day, after twelve centuries of Moslem influence, their descendants in the centre of Arabia, according to the most recent authority,[73] fail to form a clear conception of, or indeed to take almost any practical interest in, another world. The northern branch of the race, to which the Hebrews belonged, derived from an older civilisation a prospect of Hades, that their own fancy developed with great elaboration. This prospect, however, which we shall describe fully in connection with chaps. xiv. and xxvi., was one absolutely hostile to the interests of character in this life. It brought all men, whatever their life had been on earth, at last to a dead level of unsubstantial and hopeless existence. Good and evil, strong and weak, pious and infidel, alike became shades, joyless and hopeless, without even the power to praise G.o.d. We have seen in Hezekiah's case how such a prospect unnerved the most pious souls, and that revelation, even though represented at his bedside by an Isaiah, offered him no hope of an issue from it. The strength of character, however, which Hezekiah professes to have won in grappling with death, added to the closeness of communion with G.o.d which he enjoyed in this life, only brings out the absurdity of such a conclusion to life as the prospect of Sheol offered to the individual. If he was a pious man, if he was a man who had never felt himself deserted by G.o.d in this life, he was bound to revolt from so G.o.d-forsaken an existence after death. This was actually the line along which the Hebrew spirit went out to victory over those gloomy conceptions of death, that were yet unbroken by a risen Christ. _Thou wilt not_, the saint triumphantly cried, _leave my soul in Sheol, nor wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to see corruption_.

It was faith in the almightiness and reasonableness of G.o.d's ways, it was conviction of personal righteousness, it was the sense that the Lord would not desert His own in death, which sustained the believer in face of that awful shadow through which no light of revelation had yet broken.

[73] Doughty's _Arabia Deserta: Travels in Northern Arabia_, 1876-1878.

If these, then, were the wings by which a believing soul under the Old Testament soared over the grave, Isaiah may be said to have contributed to the hope of personal immortality just in so far as he strengthened them. By enhancing as he did the value and beauty of individual character, by emphasizing the indwelling of G.o.d's Spirit, he was bringing life and immortality to light, even though he spoke no word to the dying about the fact of a glorious life beyond the grave. By a.s.sisting to create in the individual that character and sense of G.o.d, which alone could a.s.sure him he would never die, but pa.s.s from the praise of the Lord in this life to a nearer enjoyment of His presence beyond, Isaiah was working along the only line by which the Spirit of G.o.d seems to have a.s.sisted the Hebrew mind to an a.s.surance of heaven.

But further in his favourite gospel of the REASONABLENESS OF G.o.d--that G.o.d does not work fruitlessly, nor create and cultivate with a view to judgement and destruction--Isaiah was furnis.h.i.+ng an argument for personal immortality, the force of which has not been exhausted. In a recent work on _The Destiny of Man_[74] the philosophic author maintains the reasonableness of the Divine methods as a ground of belief both in the continued progress of the race upon earth and in the immortality of the individual. "From the first dawning of life we see all things working together towards one mighty goal--the evolution of the most exalted and spiritual faculties which characterize humanity. Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? On such a view the riddle of the universe becomes a riddle without a meaning. The more thoroughly we comprehend the process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion. For my own part, I believe in the immortality of the soul, not in the sense in which I accept demonstrable truths of science, but as a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of G.o.d's work."

[74] By Professor Fiske.

From the same argument Isaiah drew only the former of these two conclusions. To him the certainty that G.o.d's people would survive the impending deluge of a.s.syria's brute force was based on his faith that the Lord is _a G.o.d of judgement_, of reasonable law and method, and could not have created or fostered so spiritual a people only to destroy them. The progress of religion upon earth was certain. But does not Isaiah's method equally make for the immortality of the individual? He did not draw this conclusion, but he laid down its premises with a confidence and richness of ill.u.s.tration that have never been excelled.

We, therefore, answer the question we put at the beginning of the chapter thus:--Isaiah had a gospel for the individual for this life, and all the necessary premises of a gospel for the individual for the life to come.

BOOK V.

_PROPHECIES NOT RELATING TO ISAIAH'S TIME._

ISAIAH:--

xiii.-xiv. 23

xxiv.-xxvii.

x.x.xiv.

x.x.xv.

BOOK V.

In the first thirty-nine chapters of the Book of Isaiah--the half which refers to the prophet's own career and the politics contemporary with that--we find four or five prophecies containing no reference to Isaiah himself nor to any Jewish king under whom he laboured, and painting both Israel and the foreign world in quite a different state from that in which they lay during his lifetime. These prophecies are chap. xiii., an Oracle announcing the Fall of Babylon, with its appendix, chap. xiv.

1-23, the Promise of Israel's Deliverance and an Ode upon the Fall of the Babylonian Tyrant; chaps. xxiv.-xxvii., a series of Visions of the breaking up of the universe, of restoration from exile, and even of resurrection from the dead; chap. x.x.xiv., the Vengeance of the Lord upon Edom; and chap. x.x.xv., a Song of Return from Exile.

In these prophecies a.s.syria is no longer the dominant world-force, nor Jerusalem the inviolate fortress of G.o.d and His people. If a.s.syria or Egypt is mentioned, it is but as one of the three cla.s.sical enemies of Israel; and Babylon is represented as the head and front of the hostile world. The Jews are no longer in political freedom and possession of their own land; they are either in exile or just returned from it to a depopulated country. With these altered circ.u.mstances come another temper and new doctrine. The horizon is different, and the hopes that flush in dawn upon it are not quite the same as those which we have contemplated with Isaiah in his immediate future. It is no longer the repulse of the heathen invader; the inviolateness of the sacred city; the recovery of the people from the shock of attack, and of the land from the trampling of armies. But it is the people in exile, the overthrow of the tyrant in his own home, the opening of prison doors, the laying down of a highway through the wilderness, the triumph of return and the resumption of wors.h.i.+p. There is, besides, a promise of the resurrection, which we have not found in the prophecies we have considered.

With such differences, it is not wonderful that many have denied the authors.h.i.+p of these few prophecies to Isaiah. This is a question that can be looked at calmly. It touches no dogma of the Christian faith.

Especially it does not involve the other question, so often--and, we venture to say, so unjustly--started on this point, Could not the Spirit of G.o.d have inspired Isaiah to foresee all that the prophecies in question foretell, even though he lived more than a century before the people were in circ.u.mstances to understand them? Certainly, G.o.d is almighty. The question is not, Could He have done this? but one somewhat different: Did He do it? and to this an answer can be had only from the prophecies themselves. If these mark the Babylonian hostility or captivity as already upon Israel, this is a testimony of Scripture itself, which we cannot overlook, and beside which even unquestionable traces of similarity to Isaiah's style or the fact that these oracles are bound up with Isaiah's own undoubted prophecies have little weight.

"Facts" of style will be regarded with suspicion by any one who knows how they are employed by both sides in such a question as this; while the certainty that the Book of Isaiah was put into its present form subsequently to his life will permit of,--and the evident purpose of Scripture to secure moral impressiveness rather than historical consecutiveness will account for,--later oracles being bound up with unquestioned utterances of Isaiah.

Only one of the prophecies in question confirms the tradition that it is by Isaiah, viz., chap. xiii., which bears the t.i.tle _Oracle of Babylon which Isaiah, son of Amoz, did see_; but t.i.tles are themselves so much the report of tradition, being of a later date than the rest of the text, that it is best to argue the question apart from them.

On the other hand, Isaiah's authors.h.i.+p of these prophecies, or at least the possibility of his having written them, is usually defended by appealing to his promise of the return from exile in chap. xi. and his threat of a Babylonish captivity in chap. x.x.xix. This is an argument that has not been fairly met by those who deny the Isaianic authors.h.i.+p of chaps. xiii.-xiv. 23, xxiv.-xxvii., and x.x.xv. It is a strong argument, for while, as we have seen (p. 201), there are good grounds for believing Isaiah to have been likely to make such a prediction of a Babylonish captivity as is attributed to him in chap. x.x.xix. 6, almost all the critics agree in leaving chap. xi. to him. But if chap. xi. is Isaiah's, then he undoubtedly spoke of an exile much more extensive than had taken place by his own day. Nevertheless, even this ability in xi.

to foretell an exile so vast does not account for pa.s.sages in xiii.-xiv.

23, xxiv.-xxvii., which represent the Exile either as present or as actually over. No one who reads these chapters without prejudice can fail to feel the force of such pa.s.sages in leading him to decide for an exilic or post-exilic authors.h.i.+p (see pp. 429 ff.).

Another argument against attributing these prophecies to Isaiah is that their visions of the last things, representing as they do a judgement on the whole world, and even the destruction of the whole material universe, are incompatible with Isaiah's loftiest and final hope of an inviolate Zion at last relieved and secure, of a land freed from invasion and wondrously fertile, with all the converted world, a.s.syria and Egypt, gathered round it as a centre. This question, however, is seriously complicated by the fact that in his youth Isaiah did undoubtedly prophesy a shaking of the whole world and the destruction of its inhabitants, and by the probability that his old age survived into a period, whose abounding sin would again make natural such wholesale predictions of judgement as we find in chap. xxiv.

Still, let the question of the eschatology be as obscure as we have shown, there remains this clear issue. In some chapters of the Book of Isaiah, which, from our knowledge of the circ.u.mstances of his times, we know must have been published while he was alive, we learn that the Jewish people has never left its land, nor lost its independence under Jehovah's anointed, and that the inviolateness of Zion and the retreat of the a.s.syrian invaders of Judah, without effecting the captivity of the Jews, are absolutely essential to the endurance of G.o.d's kingdom on earth. In other chapters we find that the Jews have left their land, have been long in exile (or from other pa.s.sages have just returned), and that the religious essential is no more the independence of the Jewish State under a theocratic king, but only the resumption of the Temple wors.h.i.+p. Is it possible for one man to have written both these sets of chapters? Is it possible for one age to have produced them? That is the whole question.