Isaiah 30:29-32 - Homiletics

The punishments of nations for deliverance, rather than for vengeance.

God "hath no pleasure in the death of him that dieth" ( Ezekiel 18:32 ). His justice compels him to punish the wicked, and sometimes requires the destruction even of a nation; but the main object of the Almighty in all such destructions is not to take vengeance on the oppressor, but to deliver the oppressed. Assyria, and the nations leagued with her, had now by their wickedness, their pride, their blasphemy, their cruelty, their idolatry, their impurity, provoked him, as scarcely ever had he been provoked before. He was about to inflict a signal punishment, the fame of which would spread far and wide. But it was not on the punishment itself, or on the sufferings of those affected by it, that his own eye was fixed. It was on the consequences which would follow to his own people. They would "have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept;" they would have "gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come into the mountain of the Lord." The result to them would be the removal of a constant and terrible fear; a feeling of satisfaction and safety; a sense of relief which would for a time be jubilant, and show itself in music and song, perhaps in shouting and dancing. The punishment of the Assyrians would be to them deliverance—a deliverance which, it might be hoped, would convert the heart of the nation to God.