Isaiah 1:16-20 - Homiletics

No return to God's favor without amendment of life.

The outward show of religion, which the Israelites maintained, vain and futile as it was, seemed to indicate that they were not wholly irreclaimable—they did not desire to break altogether with God. The prophet, therefore, assumes that they would wish to know the way by which they may remove God's anger, and enter once more into favor with him; and he proceeds to point out that the one and only road open to them is to amend their ways—to reverse their course of life. This amendment consists in two things: one negative, the other positive.

I. NEGATIVELY : AMENDMENT CONSISTS IN CEASING TO DO EVIL . This is the first thing needed. Men must break off their sins, put away the iniquity of their doings, resolutely determine that the works of darkness shall be done by them no more. The works will be different in different cases. To one man they will be impure acts and words; to another, falsehood, deception, equivocation; to another, profanity of speech; to another, drunkenness; to another, intemperate anger, and so on. To the Israelites at this time, or at any rate to their chief men, who are here specially addressed ( Isaiah 1:10 ), the evil-doing most common, and to which they were most prone, was cruelty and oppression. The chief men acted as judges, held courts, heard complaints, determined causes; but, instead of seeking to do justice between man and man, they sought merely to advance their own interests by means of the office entrusted to them. They accepted bribes from rich suitors to determine law-suits in their favor; they leaned in their judgments against the weak and the defenseless. They were probably a clique, who enriched themselves by playing into each others' hands, and ousting weak persons from their properties and estates by legal artifices. All this whole system of evil-doing they were required, first of all, to put aside, before they could hope that God would look upon them with anything but anger and reprobation.

II. POSITIVELY : AMENDMENT CONSISTS IN LEARNING TO DO WELL . Negative goodness is not enough. God expects each man to glorify him by good actions. Those who have gone astray must not only retrace their steps, but must enter resolutely on the path of virtue. They must "set themselves in some good way." And this must be especially done in the matters wherein they have failed . The Jewish judges had failed in their task of administering justice—they had given unjust sentences, favored oppressors, dealt hardly with the widow and the orphan. Hence the prophet's exhortations to them are "Seek out justice; correct the oppressor; right the orphan; plead the cause of the widow" ( Isaiah 1:17 ). And so it must be with all the varieties of evil-doers. Each must be exhorted to the virtue which is the opposite of the vice that he has indulged in. Each must labor, if he really seeks restoration to God's favor, to do deeds the very opposite of those which he did formerly. If he was a drunkard, he does well to become a total abstainer; if a glutton, to chasten his flesh by fasting; if impure, to give him-serf to the reclaiming of outcasts; if niggardly, "to sell all that he has and give to the poor;" if violent, to suffer wrong, and turn his cheek to the smiter.

From the nature of amendment, the prophet proceeds to its consequences, which are likewise twofold, consisting in—

I. THE CLEANSING OF THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL . Here much is kept back which is revealed later, as

II. A REWARD , EXTERNAL TO THE SOUL ITSELF , WHICH GOD 'S FREE GRACE WILL BESTOW . Here still more is kept back. The reward held out is merely temporal: "Ye shall eat the good of the land." Ye shall live in peace and prosperity, under your own vines and fig trees, and enjoy the fruits of the earth, which God in his bounty gives you. Not a whisper of the eternal reward—the blessedness reserved for man in heaven, the bliss which "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive." Probably the Israelites of Isaiah's day were too gross and sensual, too much wrapt up in material things, to have been stirred to action by anything so distant and intangible as the heavenly life, even if they could have formed the faintest conception of it. Here, again, "God has provided better things for us" ( Hebrews 10:1-39 :40), and given us a motive for exertion far beyond any that was presented to his ancient people.