Expositions of Holy Scripture: Isaiah and Jeremiah Part 14

It brings the gathering in of ourselves from all the disturbing diffusion of ourselves through earthly trifles.

2. Notice what this rest is not.

It does not mean the absence of causes of disturbance.

It does not mean the abnegation of forethought.

It does not mean an indolent pa.s.siveness.

3. Notice the duty of being thus quiet and resting.

How much we fail in this respect.

We have faith, but there seems some obstruction which stops it from flowing refres.h.i.+ngly through our lives.

We are bound to seek for its increased continuity and power in our hearts and lives.

III. Confidence and rest in G.o.d bring safety and strength.

That is true in the lowest sense of 'saved,' and not less true in the highest. The condition of all our salvation from temporal as well as spiritual evils lies thus in the same thing--that we trust G.o.d.

No harm comes to us when we trust, because then G.o.d is with us, and works for us, and cares for us. So all departments of life are bound together by the one law. Trust is the condition of being 'saved.'

And not only so, but also trust is strength. G.o.d works _for_ us; yes, but better than that, G.o.d works _in_ us and fits _us_ to work.

What powers we might be in the world! Trust should make us strong. To have confidence in G.o.d should bring us power to which all other power is as nothing. He who can feel that his foot is on the rock, how firm he should stand!

Best gives strength. The rest of faith doubles our forces. To be freed from anxious care makes a man much more likely to act vigorously and to judge wisely.

Stillness of soul, born of communion with G.o.d, makes us strong.

Stillness of soul, born of deliverance from our fears, makes us strong.

Here then is a golden chain--or shall we rather say a live wire?--whereof one end is bound to the Throne and the other encircles our poor hearts. Trust, so shall we be at rest and safe. Being at rest and safe, we shall be strong. If we link ourselves with G.o.d by faith, G.o.d will flash into us His mysterious energy, and His strength will be made perfect in our weakness.

G.o.d'S WAITING AND MAN'S

'And therefore will the Lord wait, that He may be gracious unto you, and therefore will He be exalted, that He may have mercy upon you: for the Lord is a G.o.d of judgment: blessed are they that wait for Him.'--ISAIAH x.x.x. 18.

G.o.d's waiting and man's--bold and beautiful, that He and we should be represented as sharing the same att.i.tude.

I. G.o.d's waiting,

1. The first thought is--why should He wait--why does He not act at once? Because something in us hinders. We cannot enter into spiritual blessings till we are made capable of them by faith. It would not be for our good to receive some temporal blessings till sorrow has done its work on us. The great thought here is that G.o.d has a right time for help. He is 'a G.o.d of judgment,' _i.e._. discerns our moral condition and shapes His dealings thereby. He never gives the wrong medicine.

2. His waiting is full of work to fit us to receive His grace. It is not a mere pa.s.sive standing by, till the fit conditions are seen in us; but He 'is exalted' while He waits, _i.e._. lifted up in the manifestation of His might, and by His energy in preparing us for the gifts that He has prepared for us. 'He that hath wrought us for the self-same thing is G.o.d.' He who prepares a place for us is preparing us for the place. He who has grace which He is ready to give us here, is making us ready for His grace. The meaning of all G.o.d's work on us is to form a character fit to possess His highest gifts.

3. His waiting is very patient. The divine husbandman 'waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it.' How wonderful that in a very real sense He attends on our pleasure, as it were, and lets us determine His time to work.

4. That waiting is full of divine desire to help. It is not the waiting of indifference, which says: 'If you will have it--well and good. If not, it does not matter to Me.' But 'more than they that watch for the morning,' G.o.d waits 'that He may be gracious unto you.'

II. Man's waiting.

Our att.i.tude is to be in some real sense a.n.a.logous to His.

Its main elements are firm antic.i.p.ation, patient expectation, steadfast desire, self-discipline to fit us for the influx of G.o.d's grace.

We are not to prescribe 'times and seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.' The clock of Eternity ticks more slowly than our short-pendulumed timepieces. 'If the vision tarry, wait for it.' We may well wait for G.o.d when we know that He waits for us, and that, for the most part, when He sees that we are waiting, He knows that His time is come.

But it is to be noted that the waiting desire to which He responds is directed to something better and greater than any gifts from Him, even to Himself, for it is they who 'wait for _Him_,' not only for His benefits apart from Himself, however precious these may be, who are blessed.

The blessedness of such waiting, how it calms the heart, brings into constant touch with G.o.d, detaches from the fever and the fret which kill, opens our eyes to mark the meanings of our life's history, and makes the divine gifts infinitely more precious when they do come.

After all, the time of waiting is at the longest very short. And when the perfect fruition is come, and we enter into the great s.p.a.ces of Eternity, it will seem as an handbreadth.

'Take it on trust a little while, Thou soon shalt read the mystery right In the full suns.h.i.+ne of His smile.'

THREE PICTURES OF ONE REALITY

'As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem; defending also He will deliver it; and pa.s.sing over He will preserve it'--ISAIAH x.x.xi. 5.

The immediate occasion of this very remarkable promise is, of course, the peril in which Jerusalem was placed by Sennacherib's invasion; and the fulfilment of the promise was the destruction of his army before its gates. But the promise here, like all G.o.d's promises, is eternal in substance, and applies to a community only because it applies to each member of that community. Jerusalem was saved, and that meant that every house in Jerusalem was saved, and every man in it the separate object of the divine protection So that all the histories of Scripture, and all the histories of men in the world, are but transitory ill.u.s.trations of perennial principles, and every atom of the consolation and triumph of this verse comes to each of us, as truly as it did to the men that with tremulous heart began to take cheer, as they listened to Isaiah. There is a wonderful saying in one of the other prophets which carries that lesson, where, bringing down the story of Jacob's struggle with the angel of Peniel to the encouragement of the existing generation, he says,' He spake to _us_.' They were hundreds of years after the patriarch, and yet had fallen heirs to all that G.o.d had ever said to him So, from that point of view, I am not spiritualising, or forcing the meaning of these words, when I bring them direct into the lives of each one of ourselves.

I. And, first, I would note the very striking and beautiful pictures that are given in these verses.

There are three of them, on each of which I must touch briefly. 'As birds flying, so will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem.' The form of the words in the original shows that it is the mother-bird that is thought about. And the picture rises at once of her fluttering over the nest, where the callow chickens are, unable to fly and to help themselves. It is a kind of echo of the grand metaphor in the song that is attributed to Moses, which speaks of the eagle fluttering over her nest, and taking care of her young. Jerusalem was as a nest on which, for long centuries, that infinite divine love had brooded. It was but a poor brood that had been hatched out, but yet 'as birds flying' He had watched over the city. Can you not almost see the mother-bird, made bold by maternal love, swooping down upon the intruder that sought to rob the nest, and spreading her broad pinion over the callow fledglings that lie below? That is what G.o.d does with us. As I said, it is a poor brood that is hatched out. That does not matter; still the Love bends down and helps. n.o.body but a prophet could have ventured on such a metaphor as that, and n.o.body but Jesus Christ would have ventured to mend it and say, 'As a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings,'

when there are hawks in the sky. So He, in all the past ages, was the One that 'as birds flying ... defended' His people, and would have gathered them under His wings, only they would not.

Now, beautiful as this metaphor is, as it stands, it seems to me, like some brilliant piece of colouring, to derive additional beauty from its connection with the background upon which it stands out. For just a verse before the prophet has given another emblem of what G.o.d is and does, and if you will carry with you all those thoughts of tenderness and maternal care and solicitude, and then connect them with that verse, I think the thought of His tenderness will start up into new beauty. For here is what precedes the text: 'Like as a lion, and the young lion roaring on his prey when a mult.i.tude of shepherds is called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor bow himself for the noise of them. So shall the Lord of hosts come down to fight for Mount Zion.' Look at these two pictures side by side, on the one hand the lion, with his paw on his prey, and the angry growl that answers when the shepherds vainly try to drag it away from him. That is G.o.d. Ay! but that is only an aspect of G.o.d. 'As birds flying, so the Lord will defend Jerusalem.' We have to take that into account too.

This generation is very fond of talking about G.o.d's love; does it believe in G.o.d's wrath? It is very fond of speaking about the gentleness of Jesus; has it pondered that tremendous phrase, 'the wrath of the Lamb'? The lion that growls, and the mother-bird that hovers--G.o.d is like them both. That is the first picture that is here.

The second one is not so obvious to English readers, but it is equally striking, though I do not mean to dwell upon it. The word that is translated in our text twice, 'defend' and 'defending'--'So will the Lord of hosts defend Jerusalem, and defending will deliver'--means, literally, 's.h.i.+elding.' Thus we have the same general idea as that in the previous metaphor of the mother-bird hovering above the nest: G.o.d is like a s.h.i.+eld held over us, and so flinging off front the broad and burnished surface of the Almighty buckler, all the darts that any foe can launch against as. 'Our G.o.d is a Sun and s.h.i.+eld.' I need not enlarge on this familiar metaphor.

But the third picture I wish to point to in more detail: 'Pa.s.sing over, He will deliver.' Now, the word that is there rendered 'pa.s.sing over,'

is almost a technical word in the Old Testament, because it is that employed in reference to the Pa.s.sover. And so you see the swiftness of genius with which the prophet changes his whole scene. We had the nest and the mother-bird, we had the battlefield and the s.h.i.+eld; now we are swept away back to that night when the Destroying Angel stalked through the land, and 'pa.s.sed over' the doors on which the blood had been sprinkled. And thus this G.o.d, who in one aspect may be likened to the mother-bird hovering with her little breast full of tenderness, and made brave by maternal love conquering natural timidity, and in another aspect may be likened to the broad s.h.i.+eld behind which a man stands safe, may also be likened to that Destroying Angel that went through Egypt, and smote wherever there were not the tokens of the blood on the lintels, and 'pa.s.sed over' wherever there were. Of course, the original fulfilment of this third picture is the historical case of the army of Sennacherib; outside the walls, widespread desolation; inside the walls, an untroubled night of peace. That night in Egypt is paralleled, in the old Jewish hymn that is still sung at the Pa.s.sover, with the other night when Sennacherib's men were slain; and the parallel is based on our text. So, then, here is another ill.u.s.tration of what I started with saying, that the past events of Scripture are transient expressions of perennial principles and tendencies. For the Pa.s.sover night was not to be to the contemporaries of the prophet an event receding ever further into the dim distance, but it was a present event, and to be reproduced in that catastrophe when 'in the morning when they arose, they were all dead corpses.' And the event is being repeated to-day, and will be for each of us, if we will.

So, then, there are these three pictures--the Nest and the Mother-bird, the Battlefield and the s.h.i.+eld, Egypt and the Destroying Angel.

II. We note the reality meant by these pictures.