Isaiah 63

63:1 Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? this that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in right-2 coussness, mighty to save. Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like 3 him that treadeth in the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the peoples there was no man with me: yea, I trod them in mine anger, and trampled them in my fury; 4 and their lifeblood is sprinkled upon my garments, and I have stained all my raiment. For 5 the day of vengeance was in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come. And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was none to uphold: there-6 fore mine own arm brought salvation unto me; and my fury, it upheld me. And I trod down the peoples in mine anger, and made them drunk in my fury, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth. 7 I will make mention of the lovingkindnesses of the LORD, and the praises of the LORD, according to all that the LORD hath bestowed on us; and the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which he hath bestowed on them according to his mer-8 cies, and according to the multitude of his lovingkindnesses. For he said, Surely, 9 they are my people, children that will not deal falsely: so he was their saviour. In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days 10 of old. But they rebelled, and grieved his holy spirit: therefore he was turned to be 11 their enemy, and himself fought against them. Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his people, saying, Where is he that brought them up out of the sea with the 12 shepherds of his flock? where is he that put his holy spirit in the midst of them? that caused his glorious arm to go at the right hand of Moses? that divided the water before 13 them, to make himself an everlasting name? that led them through the depths, as an horse 14 in the wilderness, that they stumbled not? As the cattle that go down into the valley, the spirit of the LORD caused them to rest: so didst thou lead thy people, to make thyself a 15 glorious name. Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy mighty acts? the yearning of thy bowels and 16 thy compassions are restrained toward me. For thou art our father, though Abraham knoweth us not, and Israel doth not acknowledge us: thou, O LORD, art our father; our 17 redeemer from everlasting is thy name. O LORD, why dost thou make us to err from thy ways, and hardenest our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants’ sake, the tribes of 18 thine inheritance. Thy holy people possessed it but a little while: our adversaries have 19 trodden down thy sanctuary. We are become as they over whom thou never barest rule; 64:1 as they that were not called by thy name. Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that

2 thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence; as when fire kindleth the brushwood, and the fire causeth the waters to boil: to make thy name 3 known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at thy presence! When thou didst terrible things which we looked not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at 4 thy presence. For from of old men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath 5 the eye seen a God beside thee, which worketh for him that waiteth for him. Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou wast wroth, and we sinned: in them have we been of long time, and shall we be saved? 6 For we are all become as one that is unclean, and all our righteousnesses are as a polluted 7 garment: and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up himself to take hold of thee: for 8 thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast consumed us by means of our iniquities. But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work 9 of thy hand. Be not wroth very sore, O LORD, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, 10 look, we beseech thee, we are all thy people. Thy holy cities are become a wilderness, Zion 11 is become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste. 12 Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O LORD? wilt thou hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?

Chap. 63. This chapter and the following relate to the same general subject, and should not be separated. The subject with which they are introduced is the destruction of the enemies of God, and this is followed by tender expressions of confidence in Jehovah, and by earnest supplications on the part of His people that He would interpose in their behalf. Barnes.

Amid the glowing descriptions of Zion’s purity, enlargement, and triumph, through which the prophet has borne us in the four chapters next preceding this, there have been brief intimations of hostile powers and of God’s visitations of retribution upon them—e.g., chaps. 59: 18, 60: 12. Here in verses 1-6 this subject is resumed for a more distinct and full presentation. Remarkably this passage is the counterpart of chap. 34, in the earlier prophecies. Here as there, Edom is the representative of the malignant, determined enemies of Zion. Here as there, the Divine Avenger and Redeemer of Zion goes forth in the might of His strength, and the blood of the slain fills the foreground of the picture—here, staining all His raiment; there, making His sword drunk with blood, and washing the mountain sides with torrents of gore. This description is the more brief, as might be expected in a case of renewed mention. With verse 7 a new subject is commenced which fills the remaining portion of this chapter and also chap. 64. The prophet sees the true Zion as she stood historically during the age immediately preceding the first advent of Christ, struggling up through scenes of blended affliction and sin, under an almost crushing sense of ill-desert and unworthiness, grasping the promises of God in faith and prayer, and gathering strength from His past mercies. Hence it abounds with most earnest expostulations, importunate pleadings, and precious allusions to God’s manifestations of mercy in former ages. H. C.

The influx of the Gentiles into Zion having been described in the preceding verses, the destruction of her enemies is now sublimely represented as a sanguinary triumph of Jehovah or the Messiah (verses 1-6). The prophet then supposes the catastrophe already past, and takes a retrospective view of God’s compassions toward His people, and of their unfaithfulness during the old economy (verses 7-14). He then assumes the tone of earnest supplication, such as might have been offered by the believing Jews when all seemed lost in the destruction of their commonwealth and temple (verses 15-19). A.

1. The prophet is singing of the victorious Messiah. He, that majestic figure that haunts all Hebrew history—He it is that comes up from Edom (which stands here to represent the sum of all the foes of Israel) with stained garments that show the terribleness of the struggle, and with step and face that manifest the completeness of His victory. It is the triumph of the Messiah that is being sung. This brings it, as you see, close to us. This Hebrew Messiah has come, and is more than the Hebrew Messiah: He is the Christian’s Christ, He is our Saviour. See how the old vision is elevated once more to a yet larger application. The victory of Christ, the destruction of evil by good, the conquest over the devil by the Son of God, at cost, with pain, so that as He comes forth His robes are red with blood; the redemption of menkind from sin by the Divine and human Saviour—this is the largest and completest meaning of the ancient vision. Bp. Brooks.

Who is this that cometh? The prophet asks the question; the personage who responds may best be regarded as the Messiah Himself. The prominence given to His person in chaps. 59: 20, 21; 60: 1-3; 61: 1-3, 10, 11, and 62: 1, 6, 11, makes this construction almost necessary. The course of thought and the logic of the context demand it. Then it is entirely in harmony with the spirit of other Messianic prophecies—e.g., Ps. 2 and 110; and with the doctrine of the New Testament—e.g., Matt. 28: 18, and its numerous parallel passages; also with Rev. 19: 11-21. In this prophetic vision the scenes of slaughter are recently past and the Great Redeemer and Avenger of His people is seen returning from the fearful carnage—His garments scarlet-dyed, blood-stained; Himself marching in triumph as a conqueror returning with renewed consciousness of power from a victorious conflict with His foes. The prophet cries, Who is this, so glorious in His apparel, so majestic in His mien? The answer reveals Him, “I that speak in righteousness,” saying only with truth and doing only in justice—doing in the way of just retribution all that I have threatened for deliverance to My people and for destruction to My incorrigible foes. “Mighty to save” gives prominence to the idea that these judgments on Edom were demanded by the interests of salvation to His people. H. C.

The prophet wonders at an object which presents itself. This object is a Conqueror returning bloody from battle: of whom, by way of dialogue, and in answer to the questions, who He is, and why so habited, an account is given; representing a mighty victory, obtained with much blood and slaughter, won by the powerful but single arm of this mighty Warrior; by which a total rout was given to His adversaries at a time when, if He had not interposed, no other was disposed, no other able, to have quelled the outrage and havoc which they were making. His stained garments demonstrate the sharpness of the engagement, as His mien and manner of approach denote the invincible greatness of His strength. In this description we have represented the hardships and the success of that combat with the enemies of our souls, by which Christ brought salvation to mankind; vanquishing sin and death, wresting the prey out of the hands of Satan, and, as the apostle expresses it, “having spoiled principalities and powers, triumphing over them in His cross.” Dean Stanhope.

It is Christ that is thus magnificently described, returning to His capital, from the land of the enemy, after His passion. Bp. Horne.—His “coming from Edom” is His rising from the dead; His return “from Bozrah” His coming back, having vanquished hell: Idumea standing for the kingdom of darkness and death, and Bozrah (the strong city of Edom) for the seat of the prince of darkness; agreeably to the custom, so familiar with the prophets, of putting the sworn enemies of the commonwealth of Israel to express the mortal and immortal enemies of the souls of God’s people. Bp. Andrews.

The Christ depicted by rationalism is a pure creation of modern imagination, an ideal and unreal personage, wholly unlike the majestic being, whom prophets foretold, to whom the evangelists bore witness, who was preached of the apostles, received up into glory, and has ever since borne unequalled sway in the history of the Church and the nations. The fiction is with the modern critics; the fact is found in the old and ever-living faith. Such an abstract ideal of human excellence, such a cold and chaste purity of unearthly perfection, such a spiritual mystic, full of contemplation and revery, such a mere moral teacher, ministering only as a man, in pity and love, to other men’s natural necessities and social well-being, is not the real, living Christ, who has drawn men unto Him; is not the Divine Man, who has renovated the human conscience, and elevated the religious consciousness of the race, and been the heart and life of the spiritual conflicts and the spiritual life of mankind for eighteen hundred years. But the attributes and qualities, which rationalism denies and disowns, are the very ones which have given Christ His rule over man’s heart and history. It is Christ the Son of God, Christ the Lamb of God, Christ the resurrection and the life, the Christ who conquered Satan and brake the bands of death, and came in righteousness, mighty to save, the Christ in whom man has found the present Deity. He, and He only is it, whom the human heart and conscience have exalted to a spiritual throne, to be the Lord and Arbiter of man’s eternal destiny. The Christ of rationalism is an unhistoric figment; the Christ of history is the Incarnate God.

The Christ of rationalism cannot meet the demands of man’s religious nature and needs. It leaves the whole problem of sin unsolved; is gives no assurance of forgiveness; it gives us only a God afar off, and not a God near to all the wants and necessities of the human soul. And, not looking to the past, if we were now to interrogate human consciousness as to its real religious wants and its present beliefs, it would still answer as of old, that it finds these met in a Christ, who blends the natural and the supernatural, the Divine and the human, an incarnate Deity who came to redeem a fallen race. The Christ of the Bible and the Christ of the historic Church is the very Christ whom man now craves; and He is still a living presence in every living and believing soul. H. B. Smith.

Mighty to save. We cannot go to Him too often, nor ask of Him too much. We have no sin but He has a pardon for it; no weakness but He has strength for it; no cankering care but He has relief for it; no grievous sorrow but He has comfort for it; no bleeding heart-wound but He has balm to soothe and a bandage to bind it up. It is impossible for us to expect too much from His generosity, or trust too implicitly to the bounties of His providence and the aids of His Spirit. It is equally easy for God to supply our greatest as our smallest wants, to carry our heaviest as our lightest burden. In the most desperate cases of sinners and in the darkest circumstances of saints, “when all power is gone” and there seems no outget or deliverance, God is mighty to save. T. Guthrie.

2. It is a slight but effective stroke in this fine picture, that the first verse seems to speak of the stranger as still at a distance, whereas in the second he has come so near as to be addressed directly. A.

3. The Orientals crushed their grapes for wine with the foot, thus staining their garments with the red juice of the grape. This furnishes the figure here. H. C.—The most satisfactory solution of the second sentence seems to be that these words are added to convey the idea that all the nations were on the adverse side, none on that of the conqueror. The sense will then be not that they refused to join in trampling others, but simply that they were among the trampled. As if he had said, I trod the press alone, and all the nations, without exception, were trodden in it. By all the nations we are of course to understand all but God’s people. While the impossibility of applying the expression to our Saviour’s sufferings cannot be too strongly stated, there is no need of denying that the figure may be happily accommodated in the way suggested; as many expressions of the Old Testament may be applied to different objects with good effect, provided we are careful to avoid confounding such accommodations with the strict and primary import of the passage. A.

The expression “I have trodden the wine-press alone” is commonly applied to Christ in the loneliness of His agony in Gethsemane, and in His desertion through the scenes of His trial and crucifixion. And there could not be a more vivid picture of the soltariness of the Saviour in His sufferings—when “of the people there was none with Him;” when, as He lay upon the ground in His bloody sweat, His disciples were sleeping within sound of His groaning; when, as the traitor seized Him, “all the disciples forsook Him, and fled;” and Peter mustered courage to follow Him afar off, only to deny Him at the last. Yet the connection shows that it is not the Redeemer in His sorrows, but in His triumphs, who is here depicted. He is coming from Edom, the typical enemy of Israel, where by His unaided strength He has visited judgment and destruction upon the foes of His Church. It is the same picture which is repeated in Rev. 19: 13, of the “Word of God clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, who treadeth the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.” Yet love and mercy ever predominate over judgments. His judgments upon the obdurate illustrate His grace to the penitent; and often, as with Israel of old, judgments recall His people to their dependence upon His grace. The Saviour identifies Himself with His flock. He makes their affliction His own, and will make them partakers in His triumph and joy. J. P. T.

4. This figurative statement of the text in its broadest meaning furnishes the key to the grand tragedy of human history. Though having special reference to Moab and Edom, the eminent foes of Israel, yet the great fact it declares has been, in substance, enacted among all nations, in all ages of time until now. Of nation after nation the true record of history is written before in the word of the prophet, that He has “trodden them in the wine-press of His wrath,” of people after people that were, but are not; that He “has put down their strength to the earth.” Among the empires destroyed before His first coming, and the nations that have perished since, has Christ the Avenger been enacting judgments in behalf of His redeemed. All His judgments have been in the earth that its inhabitants might learn His righteousness and accept His redemption. So has it been in the whole past, in substance the day of God’s vengeance has been in order that the year of His redeemed might be brought on. So it is to-day, so will it be to the end of the period in which He enacts judgments against nations in the flesh. There is no grander truth than this for our conception, none besides this which solves effectually the sore problem of God’s tragic providences in man’s history. For this declares that His judgments in every age and upon every scale have been in the interest of His redemptive purpose and plan. B.

Through Oriental caste and despotism, the license of the Greek democracy, the iron, imperial power of Rome, the perilous luxury of monarchies and the aristocracy, passive obedience to kings and hierarchies, has the race made its suffering course toward the blessings of representative government and religious liberty. Through the conflicts of race with race, of the sons of Shem with the sons of Japheth, of Asiatic with European prowess, of the Latin with the German stock, of the Celt with the Saxon, have we fought our way to the knowledge of the Christian principle that the race is one and a brotherhood, and that freedom shall yet be given unto all. Each of the greatest battles of the race has been a step in the progress of human rights. H. B. Smith.

5. Fury here takes the place of righteousness in chap. 59 : 16, not as a synonym, but as an equivalent. God’s wrath is but the executioner and agent of His justice. Upon either He might therefore be described as exclusively relying. A.—The meaning is that Jesus Messiah is equal by Himself alone to the exigencies of righteous retribution upon the guilty nations of men. His people never need fear any failure in the resources of His power, whether to save themselves or to destroy His unrepentant foes.

6. “Make them drunk in My fury” is the conception of the wine-cup of the Lord’s indignation which He passes round for guilty nations to drink, to madden them for self-destruction. In Jer. 25 : 15-31 this conception is fully expanded. It appears frequently and with great pertinence and force in other prophets.

1-6. This passage proves that Christ is mighty to save His people by destroying their enemies. From this the inference is entirely legitimate that He is mighty to save them in every possible relation—against every sort of foe. The former, however, is the thing here affirmed. The latter comes from it by inference only.

7. The portion that follows, to the end of chap. 64, treats of Zion’s sins and sufferings; her struggles of faith and prayer, and her reminiscences of God’s mercies, called up to revive her spiritual strength. Remarkably the passage begins with this view of past mercies. The verb, “I will mention,” is the same which occurred in chap. 62 : 6, “Ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence;” and means either to recall to one’s own mind or to remind another.

9. The phrase, “The angel of His presence” leads the mind to that uncreated angel whose presence was guaranteed to Moses in behalf of Israel and was manifested in the pillar of cloud and of fire throughout their journeyings in the wilderness. (See Ex. 23 : 20-23.) He was God’s very presence. God was present in him, for this must be the legitimate sense of the phrase, “My name is in him.” This same angel is identified with the presence of Jehovah, and with Jehovah Himself (Ex. 33 : 12-23 ; 34 : 5-9) ; and also at the bush (Ex. 3 : 2, 4-6). A careful examination of these and kindred passages in the Old Testament, coupled with New Testament allusions to them, will show most fully that the great Personage who revealed Himself in the Old Testament ages, sometimes under the name, “The angel of the Lord,” and often simply as “the Lord,” was no other than the Messiah Himself, the Son of God, “the brightness of the Father’s glory,” the great Revealer of God to man, and the supreme head of the Church under the old economy no less truly though less palpably than under the new. It was He who saved them ; who also bare them all the days of old as a tender mother carries in her arms her infant babe. H. C.

Even Hitzig admits the identity of the angel of Jehovah’s presence with Jehovah Himself, but explains it away by making angel an abstract term, not denoting in any case a person, but the manifestation of Jehovah’s presence at a certain time and place. Hendewerk, on the other hand, alleges that the angel is always represented as a personality distinct from Jehovah Himself. By blending these concessions from two writers of the same great school, we obtain a striking testimony, if not to the absolute truth, to the scriptural correctness of the old Christian doctrine, as expounded with consummate force and clearness by Vitringa in his comment on this passage—viz., the doctrine that the angel of God’s presence, who is mentioned in the passages already cited, and from time to time in other books of the Old Testament (Gen. 28 : 13 ; 31 : 11 ; 48 : 16 ; Ex. 3 : 2 ; Josh. 5 : 14 ; Judges 13 : 6 ; Hos. 12 : 5 ; Zech. 3 : 1 ; Mal. 3 : 1 ; Ps. 34 : 8), was that Divine Person who is represented in the New as the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person (Heb. 1:3), the image of God (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15), in whose face the glory of God shines (2 Cor. 4:6), and in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9). A.

In Mal. 3:1 it is plain that “the Messenger, or Angel of the covenant,” the covenant of grace, was no other than Christ; and as allusion is made to the same Person in all the other passages before mentioned, and in the words of Isaiah in the text, it follows that He who appeared to Moses, He who was seen by Manoah, He who was spoken of by Zechariah, He whom Isaiah describes as saving and redeeming Israel, must also be Christ. In the language of the prophet, Christ is styled “the Angel of God’s presence;” but mark the authority and dignity of His person; sometimes He is called “Wonderful;” sometimes “the Lord;” sometimes He is said to have “the name of God in Him;” and sometimes He is styled “God.” He, therefore, to whom such appellations are given, can be no created being; he must be the Eternal Son of God; he must be “the Word of God,” by whom God speaks to mankind; He must be the same that “was in the beginning with God, and was God;” the same “by whom all things were created;” the same who was made man, the same who redeemed us, the same who ever liveth to make intercession for us. Bp. Huntingford.

Let us not overlook the fact that God does not sit aloft in remote and inaccessible seclusion from our human trials. They are more real to God than they are to us. No being in the universe feels the woes of human life so deeply as He feels them. Not one pang of suffering rasps any human nerve which God does not appropriate as if it were His own. This is the working of infinite sympathies in the heart of a loving Creator. “In all their affliction He was afflicted.” The true value of any human life consists in identifying it with the life of God. In such supreme alliance, no man can be unhappy. And no man can be happy without it. Life without God is not worth living. All that afflicts men here is one dull, dead weight of woe, unless it is lifted and upborne by God. Phelps.

In all our afflictions He is afflicted. Having had experience in our outward and inward sufferings, Christ knows and compassionates our case. The sweetness and worth of all these our passions and sensibilities are in Him as God-man, and therefore He is touched with a feeling of our infirmities, and is moved to intercede for us, with a perpetual memory of what we are and what we need. H. H.—We would pray better and more, and with vaster confidence, if we would in our supplications pray as though we thought God’s Son was going to take our suit and plead it before the Father, not because He wants to have us gratified simply, but because He is one of us, one in us, and His pulse beats with ours, and our distresses are His distresses. C. H. P.

Of one thing every child of God may be sure, in the hour of His suffering or of His sorrow, and that is that He is not Himself more deeply interested in His present trial than His Saviour is interested in that trial in His behalf. Nothing comes to pass, in the experience of a believer, that the Saviour is not fully familiar with; nor does the Saviour ever fail to be touched with the feeling of all the infirmities of His every follower with which He is thus familiar. Here is a source of cheer in every sorest need. S. S. T.

His extraordinary sensibility to human feeling became operative at once as sympathy, was at once translated into action. All was felt which human feeling felt, and then all was sympathized with actively, till at last, upon the cross, all the sorrows of the world were taken in to Himself and borne in the activity of voluntary suffering, that they might be forever, in the end, lifted off the heart of mankind. It is there, when intense sensibility to the want, and woe, and sin of men had led Him to absolute self-sacrifice through sympathy—there, in that bowed head and broken Manhood—that we realize at last, in the radiance of love which eye hath not seen, the King in His perfect beauty. S. A. Brooke.

Such occult emanations of compassion from the heart of our Lord are going into all the homes of sorrow where believing men and women suffer. They are vibrating on the air invisibly the world over. They bring the afflicted into a very sacred alliance. What they suffer Christ suffers. For this He became a Man of Sorrows. Do we long in our desolateness for human fellowship? Our Redeemer is a suffering man. Do we faint for the want of a more than human strength? Our Redeemer is the Son of God. Our very commonest and most homely griefs He lifts up into the embrace of His divinest sympathies, and invests them with the glory of His atoning pains. This is a faithful saying, that in some way we know not how, if we suffer we shall also reign with Him. Phelps.

The lessons only which have cost us pain, which we have learned in struggle, which have been born out of anguish of heart, will heal and really bless others. It is when we have passed through the bitterness of temptation, wrestling with evil and sore beset, victorious only through the grace of Christ, that we are ready to be helpers of others in temptation. It is only when we have known sorrow, when the chords of our love have been swept by it, and when we have been comforted and helped to endure, that we are fitted to become comforters of others in sorrow. J. R. Miller.

In His love and in His pity He redeemed them. No lost soul shall murmur hereafter that the tender loving-kindness of God has not willed to save it. No saint in glory shall pretend that aught in him has been accepted and crowned save the infinite merit, the priceless gifts of his Redeemer. The dying love of Jesus embraces the race, and yet it concentrates itself with direct—as it seems to us—with exclusive intensity upon each separate soul. He dies for all, and yet He dies for each; as if each soul were the solitary object of His incarnation and of His death. Beneath the cross we may each of us legitimately fix our soul’s eye on the great Sufferer, and we may say with His apostle, “He loved me and gave Himself for me.” Liddon.

“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but should have eternal life.” The little child who has learned his earliest lessons of what Father and Son, loving and giving, trust and life mean, by the sweet experiences of his own father’s home and his mother’s love, can grasp these blessed words. They carry the deepest mysteries which will still gleam before us unfathomed in all their profundity, unappropriated in all their blessedness, when millennia have passed since we stood in the inner shrine of heaven. Wonderful the word which blesses the child, which transcends the angel before the throne! A. M.

10. His Holy Spirit.** This form of expression assumes that God sends forth the Holy Spirit as a distinct personality, and causes Him to dwell within the people. To this we find allusion in Neh. 9:20, “Thou gavest also thy Good Spirit to instruct them;” and in Hag. 2:5, “According to the word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my Spirit remaineth among you; fear not.” Stephen had his eye on the same great fact when (Acts 7:51) he charged it upon the hardened Jews of his time; “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye.” H. C.

The Holy Spirit may be so vexed by opposition, so quenched in His influences by godless indifference, that He will recognize the sinner as hopelessly corrupt and desperately beyond recovery—his spiritual disease incurable. With such recognition He probably abandons the soul forever. As we can only be saved by the Holy Ghost, men are as ruined when He departs as if they had committed the unpardonable sin. His departure never takes place while salvation is a possibility. When the Holy Spirit departs from a soul, it ripens for perdition. As well may the Ethiopian attempt to change the color of his skin as for a man to dream of salvation when deserted by the Holy Spirit. Isaiah refers to such desperate resistance to His office-work as transforms God into man’s enemy. He says of the Israelites: “They rebelled and vexed His Holy Spirit: therefore He was turned to be their enemy, and He fought against them.” David speaks of God as “giving men up to their own lusts,” and permitting them to “walk in the way of their own counsels.” Leech.

12,13. These verses continue the thoughtful questions which the people propose to their own hearts as they think of the God of their fathers, the fountain of former mercies. “Who marched them through the deeps; as a horse in the wilderness, so they will not stumble.” The prophet seems to see them moving forward; compares their advance to that of a horse marching sure-footed along the desert, and predicts with all confidence, “he will not stumble!” Under God’s guiding hand, all obstructions will be removed, and their course being wisely directed, they will not fail.

14. Following the tenses closely, the course of thought in this verse may be expressed thus: “As beasts (tame animals of the flock or the herd) will go down into the valley for their repose; so the Spirit of the Lord will give him (Israel) rest”—i.e., under His protection. “So, in this way, thou hast in all past ages led Thy people to make for Thyself a glorious name.” This last clause generalizes the facts of the nation’s history, showing especially that God had wrought among them and for them to the end of glorifying His own name. To “give Israel rest” is the usual phrase for locating them in Canaan after a whole generation of unrest in the wilderness. (See De. 12:9, 10; Ps. 95:11.) H. C.

15,19. An earnest supplication in view of the condition of Israel. The arguments are very beautiful and various for His interposition. 1. An appeal to Jehovah in view of His former mercies (verse 15). 2. An argument from the fact that He was their Father, though they should be disowned and despised by all others (verse 16). 3. Earnest intercession from the fact that His enemies had trodden down the sanctuary, and that those who never acknowledged Him ruled in the land that He had given to His own people (verses 17-19). 4. An earnest pleading with God in view of the inestimable value of the favors which He conferred—the fact that the world could confer nothing to be compared with His favor (chap. 64: 1-5). 5. An argument derived from the general prevalence of irreligion among the people (verses 6, 7). 6. Affectionate pleading from the fact that they were His people (verses 8, 9). 7. Argument from the fact that the holy city was waste; the temple in ruins; that the holy and beautiful house where their fathers worshipped had been burned up with fire (verses 10-12). Barnes.

15. Look (down) from heaven and see from Thy dwelling-place of holiness and beauty! Where is Thy zeal and Thy might (or mighty deeds)? The sounding of Thy bowels and Thy mercies toward me have withdrawn themselves. The foregoing description of God’s ancient favors is now made the ground of an importunate appeal for new ones. The unusual word for dwelling-place is borrowed from the prayer of Solomon. A.—An earnest appeal to God to look compassionately upon their woeful state, tenderly (not reproachfully) asking where His former interest in their behalf is now, and where those sublime manifestations of His power; and intimating that the outflow of His warm sympathies for them has been checked, restrained. H. C.

16. The true sense of the verse, as it appears to me, is that the Church or chosen people, although once, for temporary reasons, coextensive and coincident with a single race, is not essentially a national organization, but a spiritual body. Its father is not Abraham or Israel, but Jehovah, who is and always has been its Redeemer, who has borne that name from everlasting; or as Hitzig understands the last clause, He is our Redeemer, whose name is from everlasting. According to this explanation, this verse explicitly asserts what is implied and indirectly taught throughout these prophecies, in reference to the true design and mission of the Church, and its relation to Jehovah, to the world and to the single race with which of old it seemed to be identified. The strong terms of this verse are of course to be comparatively understood not as implying that the

Church will ever have occasion to repudiate its historical relation to the patriarchs, or cease to include among its members many of their natural descendants, but simply as denying all continued or perpetual pre-eminence to Israel as a race, and exalting the common relation of believers to their great Head as paramount to all connection with particular progenitors—the very doctrine so repeatedly and emphatically taught in the New Testament. A.

Thou art our Father. Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, and though we should be disowned by all others, we will still believe that Thou dost sustain the relation of a Father. Though they were suffering and though they saw no human aid, yet their confidence was unwavering that He had still tender compassion toward them. God had often manifested for them a kind paternal care, and they believed that He had still the same regard for them. Barnes.

He made us, and is our Father by creation; He preserves us, and is our Father by His providential care; He has in His mercy taken us into His family, and is therefore our Father by adoption; He has redeemed us by His infinite love, and delivered us from the yoke of our sins and from bondage to Satan, and is our Father by that act of redemption. Maldonatus and Dion. Carthusianus.

This, instead of being less true than earthly relationship, is the one relationship which, when a man enters into, he ceases to be homeless and a wanderer, a fugitive and vagabond upon the face of the earth and from the face of God—ceases to be a mere withered leaf borne helpless on the wind, whose origin none cares to trace, and whose destiny none turns to see; he has found his place in the universe, he has found a hold and a hope, and however in himself unstable, weak, and incapable, he rests enduringly in the unchangeable Father. He has been outside, thinking the world a strange, cold, barren, friendless and unsatisfying place; he has wandered about, not seeing, “through the thick cloud,” and still less dreaming that One was seeing and caring for him, and now he finds he has a Father, One to love, One to serve, One to glorify, One to worship. Dods.

“How is God connected with me? How is He affected toward me?” are questions of infinite interest to a rational being. The answer of Christ to these questions is simple and explicit, conveyed in a single word of profound significance and of surpassing tenderness—the word Father. To man this term belongs emphatically, and it is one of the wealthiest in human language; and men can have no difficulty in comprehending all its meaning. The relation it indicates has no such interpretation among other intelligent creatures as it finds in this world. There is no fatherhood or childhood among angels, no derivation of being from one to the other. Only men on earth are connected together in this extraordinary sense; and from the imperfect type existing among themselves they at least are able to rise to the supreme reality in God. The human spirit is the offspring, the immediate and direct offspring of the ever-living Spirit. It is capable of bearing, and does bear, and it is the only thing that bears or is capable of bearing a resemblance to God. When we have said that God created the heavens, the earth and all material things, we have exhausted all of which the subject admits. But it is not simply true that He created minds also; He is the Father of minds and of nothing else. This peculiar relation of God to man is beautifully suggestive of authority, the very highest form of which known in this world is the parental. God is a King, but He is a Father-King; His subjects are His own children, and His government of them, in its essential spirit, in all its laws and its acts, is strictly and only parental. He is wise, He is righteous, He is just, His holy purpose shall stand, He must and will do all that is necessary for the good of the entire universe. But paternal love is the element in which God lives and reigns; it is the moving force in the spiritual universe; infinite desire to produce happiness, to fill creation with the largest possible amount of enduring joy. J. Young.

Our Redeemer. The “Kinsman-Redeemer” would be the nearest rendering of the original term (God), but even this fails adequately to convey the deep significance of the Hebrew. A more exact definition would be “a person related by blood, who by right of consanguinity lays claim to and redeems a person or thing, vindicates the rights involved or avenges the wrong sustained” (Glass). But it is in its spiritual aspect that it was made the subject of so much solicitude in the law, and the very name assumed so frequently in the prophets as a designation of the Divine Redeemer, and the relation which as such He sustained toward His people. D. Macdonald.

17. The Scriptures use strong language concerning that providential agency of God which permits temptation to occur and to have force enough to tempt men into sin. They speak of God as doing Himself what He suffers to be done by other agencies than His own. H. C.

18. It cannot be proved that this whole passage has respect to the Jews in their present dispersion: first, because the sufferings of the Church in after ages are frequently presented under figures drawn from the peculiar institutions of the old economy; and secondly, because the early history of Israel is as much the early history of the Christian Church as of the Jewish nation, so that we have as much right as the Jews to lament the profanation of the Holy Land, and more cause to pray for its recovery by Christendom, than they for its restoration to themselves. A.

Chap. 64. This chapter continues and completes the course of thought which commences with chap. 63:7. This portion is prayer throughout, blending intercession with confession of sin. The prophet expresses sentiments, feelings, prayers, adapted to the case of the true Church, the few found faithful among the many faithless, in the age next before the coming of their Messiah. They see the Jewish nation as such about to be disowned of God as His people and doomed to ruin; and their trembling hearts cry out, “Must the real Zion perish too? Will not our own redeeming Father interpose to save?” H. C.

This chapter, like the one before it, from which it is in fact inseparable, has respect to the critical or turning point between the old and new dispensations, and presents it just as it might naturally have appeared to the believing Jews—i.e., the first Christian converts, at that juncture. The strongest confidence is expressed in the Divine power, founded upon former experience (verses 1-3). The two great facts of Israel’s rejection as a nation, and the continued existence of the Church, are brought together in verse 4. The unworthiness of Israel is acknowledged still more fully (verses 5, 6). The sovereign authority of God is humbly recognized (verse 7). His favor is earnestly implored (verse 8). The external prerogatives of Israel are lost (verse 9). But will God for that cause cast off the true Israel, His own Church or people? (verse 10). A.

1. In the Hebrew Bibles this verse stands at the close of the previous chapter. The division in our English version is better. Still better than either would be no division at all between these chapters. The course of thought is unbroken. H. C.—The passionate apostrophe in this verse, far from being injured or obscured, is rendered more expressive by its close connection with the previous complaints and lamentations. The idea now suggested is, that weary of complaint the people or the

prophet speaking for them suddenly appeals to God directly with an ardent wish that He would deal with them as in days of old. The remaining words are a poetical description of Jehovah’s interposition or the manifestation of His presence, under figures drawn perhaps from the account of His epiphany on Sinai. A.