Isaiah 40

Isaiah 40:1-2

Isa. 40:1, 2. “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God; speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem; and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received of the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” God often executes very severe judgments on his visible church for their sins, and though her punishment be never double to her deserts, or more than her deserts, yet she oftentimes suffers double in two respects.

1. Double to the sufferings which their sins, their violations of duties of the second table of the law, have brought on others, in which sense the false church is commanded to be punished. Revelation 18:6. “Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double; in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double.”
2. Double to all the pleasure or benefit, the wealth or worldly advancement, which she hath obtained or aimed at by her sins, as in the place in Revelations, it follows in the next verse, “How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her.” By double, is not meant precisely twice so much, but vastly more. Thus God does not only punish Babylon, or the false church, but his own visible church, when they corrupt themselves, and make themselves in a great measure a false church, like as Jerusalem and Israel of old did. God punished them with great severity; he punished them doubly. Jeremiah 16:18, “I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double, because they have defiled my land.” God caused all the idolatrous nations to drink the wine cup of his fury, and especially Sheshack, or Babylon, but he in the first place gave it to Jerusalem. Jeremiah 25.

God takes notice of the great severity with which he had punished Jerusalem; for this is manifestly the language of compassion. A father, while in wrath he is correcting his child, makes light of its sufferings; but when his heart begins to relent, and bowels of compassion to yearn, his sufferings begin to look great in his eyes. God is often represented as thus exercising the bowels of a merciful father towards his people after severe correction. See Judges 10:6; Jeremiah 31:20.

Isa. 40:15

Isaiah 40:15

Isa. 40:15. “He taketh up the isles as a very little thing.” A very fine remark, and a solid correction of the common translation, is here made by that learned, sagacious, and devout expositor, Vitringa. He observes that the common translation is neither answerable to the import of the original, nor consonant to the structure of the discourse. The prophet had no intention to inform mankind what the Almighty could do with regard to the islands, if he pleased to exert his power, but his design was to show how insignificant, or rather what mere nothings, they are in his esteem, and before his majesty. The islands, says he, though so spacious as to afford room for the erection of kingdoms and the abode of nations, though so strong as to withstand for many thousands of years the raging and reiterated assaults of the whole watery world, are yet before the adored Jehovah small as the minutest grain, which the eye can scarce discern, light as the feathered mote, which the least breath hurries away like a tempest, Insulae sunt, ut levi quid, quod avolat. “The deep-rooted islands are as the volatile atom, which, by the gentlest undulations of the air, is wafted to and fro in perpetual agitations.” Hervey’s Meditations, vol. 2. p. 130.

Isa. 41:8