071. Isaiah’s Acknowledgment Of God’s Mercy.

Isaiah’s Acknowledgment Of God’s Mercy.

Isaiah’s Acknowledgment, etc., as recorded.—Isaiah 25:1-8. In his most lofty and poetic strains the prophet extols the Divine perfection, and praises God in prospect of the accomplishment of the prophecies he had just delivered. Isaiah had himself witnessed the fulfillment of many prophecies. Egypt in all her strength and beauty had been laid waste that Israel might be delivered; the cities of Canaan had been destroyed that the Israelites might possess their inheritance; Babylon the Great and Tyre, with their splendid palaces and glittering domes, would be desolated, while Jerusalem the “holy city,” would become a “palace of strangers.” These and all other changes relating to the ruin of all anti-Christian opposers of the gospel, were the burden of the prophet’s thought.

God has always protected his Church, and guarded well her bulwarks; though at times her numbers have been small, the prophet has predicted that all nations shall be gathered unto her. By the term “strangers,” is meant heathen, and, as St. Paul calls them, “aliens to the commonwealth of Israel.” In the sixth, seventh, and eighth verses, there is a prophecy of the sufferings of our Savior, and the glory which should follow, from the time of his coming on earth till the heavens shall be rolled away as a scroll and time be no longer. In the last verses there is an allusion to the joy of heaven, the home of the redeemed. How wonderfully in these latter days is God removing “the veil that is spread over all nations,” as the prophet so poetically expresses it, and the banner of Jehovah has not only been raised in the islands of the sea, but God is fast fulfilling the predictions of this inspired prophet, and making to himself a “feast of fat things of wine on the lees well refined.”