Verses 6-16
Divine Accusations
This paragraph is charged with the old complaint against the nominal people of God. They could not live within their appointed boundaries; it seemed to be impossible for them to be content with the divinely-erected altar; they must needs enter into foreign alliances, and into relations with strangers whose religion was calculated to debase the intellect and to deprave the heart. This is the charge of the sixth verse: The people of God were replenished from the east, and had become soothsayers like the Philistines; they pleased themselves in the children of strangers. They were cloud-diviners; they were looking about for sights, omens, signs, wonders; they were trying to make revelations as we should say, Bibles for themselves, and their inventions brought upon them coldness of heart and forsakenness by the divine Father. This is no ancient lapse; we are not exhuming the history of the world whilst dwelling upon such apostasies: who is content with his own religion? Who is there into whose heart there does not come now and again a subtle suggestion that he can enlarge the revelation he has, that he can find out something for himself, that if he continues to peruse the clouds he may see there some omens which he may dignify with the name of divine appearances? We cannot be content with the book; we want to write a second volume, to add something, at least a footnote of our own, that we may see the work of our own inventiveness and ingenuity.
How difficult is discipline in every department of life! How hard is it to keep to the strict and well-defined line, and to subdue the energy of invention, and to say to that curious and marvellous power within us which would do something on its own account to amend the ways of providence, and enlarge the scope of revelation, Sit down: speak not: withdraw from the front, and study lessons of humility. This apostasy takes various forms; but every age has its own form of apostasy, or withdrawal from God. The Philistines are dead, old soothsaying is probably forgotten, the days of witchcraft and magic are cleared out of the immediate history of the time, but there may be a witchcraft of the higher sort, a magic of another quality and range altogether; after all it may be only the name we have got rid of, the quality and the energy of the thing abandoned may still be amongst us, working in new ways and under new conditions all its mischief in the heart. It would seem as if men must knock at doors for themselves, and not be content with the wide-open gate which God has sent, through which men may evermore go straight up to himself without priestly medium or official intervention of any kind. Who has not thought that he might see a spirit or feel one? Who has not, even under some reluctance and protestation, put himself within conditions supposed to be favourable to manifestations, the movement of an article of furniture, a shadow passing before the vision, a touch in the darkness, who has not thought, even whilst repudiating the idea in its broader aspects, that he might somehow increase the revelation which God has given to man, and find some back-stair way into the sanctuary of the heavens, into the innermost place of the invisible, where the lightnings are, where the spiritual electricity resides, and where even God himself dwells as in a chosen tabernacle? We have various forms, therefore, of cloud-reading, and divination, and calculation, and geometrical figures, and drawing of lots; but the whole thing means that we want to break another door into the eternal, and find another passage into the invisible and infinite. God always has rebuked this inventiveness and this audacity. Nothing good has ever come of it It has troubled the Church for a time; it has divided families; it has appeared to bring with it great benefits, but all such machinery, magic, divination has left the world without having conferred upon it any solid and valuable benefit: men have come back to the old book and the familiar story, and they have found in the eternal fountain of the Bible all that was needful for the fertilisation of the soul, and the comfort of life under all the stress and storm of sorrow, darkness, and temptation's most furious assaults.
In the case before us we read: "Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people." The term is logical. God never forsakes his people in any whimsical way: he is not a man, or a son of man, that he should treat his creatures arbitrarily, moodily, now full of sunshine in relation to them, and now covered with great clouds, without giving any reason for the change. It is a most noticeable feature in Biblical revelation that when God forsakes men he gives the reason for abandoning them. The reason is always moral. God never leaves man because he is little, or weak, or self-distrustful, or friendless, or homeless, or brokenhearted; when God forsakes man it is because man has first forsaken him, broken his laws, defied his sword, challenged his judgment, forsaken with ungrateful abandonment the altar at which the life has received its richest blessing. So, never let us neglect the word "therefore" in reading concerning divine judgments. God will never forsake the life that trusts him. If we are conscious of being divinely forsaken, let us hold severe inquest into moral actions or moral dispositions: sometimes the apostasy is inward, it is a spiritual declension, almost without a name, certainly without a shape, a shaking of thought, a disturbing of confidence, a flaw all but invisible, except to God's eye, in the constancy of love: sometimes the apostasy is external; it writes itself in unholy action; it makes itself vivid even to terribleness in the down-going of our whole nature and our whole attitude towards man and towards God. But the point to be remembered is this when we are forsaken it is because we have forsaken God. Is God to be the companion of idols? Is the Lord to be invited into darkened rooms, that he may be one of the deities of the universe, and take his place in order of seniority or of nominal superiority? Is he to be invited to compete with the fancies of the human brain for the sovereignty of human mind and the arbitrament of human destiny? Herein he is a jealous God. "The Lord alone shall be exalted in that day." If we make gods we must be content with the manufactures which we produce; but we never can persuade the eternal God to sit down with our wooden deities, and hold counsel with the inventions and fictions of a diseased imagination. "Choose you this day whom ye will serve." Again: "If Baal be God, serve him; if the Lord, serve him." If you are going to read the universe by the aid of Planchette, read it, and abide by the issue; but do not mix things that have no congeniality separate one from another, and having chosen your idols stand up for them, and prove yourselves worthy of the dehumanising and debasing relation. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," ye cannot read a Bible and pursue the clouds with any hope of finding in them an additional revelation; you cannot have the Cross of Christ and some wooden image of your own manufacture. When we are real in our religion we shall blessedly and helpfully assist the world.
Now we come upon another logical course:
"Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures; their land is also full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots: their land also is full of idols; they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made" ( Isa 2:7-8 ).
Observe how the sequence runs: money in abundance: money will buy horses, and horses stand for power: horses will need chariots, and chariots mean dash, speed, ostentation money, horses, chariots, can men end there? They cannot; and given money, horses, chariots, without a corresponding sanctification, without the inworking of that spirit of self-control which expresses the action of the Holy Ghost, and you compel men to go farther and to fill their land with idols. The sequence cannot be broken. Men may have money, horses, chariots, and the true God; but when men have money, horses, chariots, and no god that is true, they will make gods for themselves, for they must eke out their ostentation by some sort of nominal piety. Men will build churches; men must have religious rites and ceremonies; and what can suit the worldly man better than an idol that takes no notice of him, a wooden deity that never troubles him with its disciplinary obligations? What is worse for any land than unsanctified prosperity? Who can trust himself beyond a given point with the riches and honours of this world? How they enkindle evil fires! how they madden human ambition! how they cause the man to become boastful, imperious, overbearing, and oppressive! Who has not had some little experience of this? Some men can carry more of the world's riches than others, and yet retain their modesty; but wherever money, horses, chariots come, without corresponding moral discipline and chastening, there must be an issue in idolatry. Who can be quite content without some form of religion? Strangely and inexplicably, some men's religion is unbelief. They protest so much against belief that they are obliged to make a kind of deity of their unbelief. They are proud of it, and yet they are conscious of the weakness of their position; they fill up with hollow laughter that which is wanting in solidity and continuity of argument. Somewhere, somehow, in some form, every man will have a religion beyond himself, and that religion will either be faith, or unbelief; God, or mammon; the living Father, or the deaf and dumb idols of man's own making.
What then comes? Universal apostasy in the land:
"And the mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself" ( Isa 2:9 ).
Apostasy is not partial, it is universal. That is the case with the world as God views it. When the world left him, according to the evangelical conception, it went altogether. God looked from heaven to see if there were any righteous, and he said, There is none righteous, no, not one: they are altogether corrupt: they have turned out of the way: there is none that doeth good, no, not one. A marvellous action is this of moral apostasy! It drags down whole worlds with it; it troubles every section of every province in God's empire; it troubles the judgment, the conscience, the imagination, the will; it makes every appetite an open mouth which devours things that are good, and destroys qualities that are holy. So it is with the individual character. You do not find a man recognised by the divine judgment as good in parts, that is to say, good in his judgment, but bad in his will; excellent in taste, but avaricious and worldly and self-promoting. The Lord does not adopt that species of criticism; the judgment of God is not eclectic, taking an excellence here and pointing out a default there; the Lord looketh on the heart, and when the heart goes it goes altogether, in one tremendous swing, in one awful plunge. Pray for the heart; say, Lord, save my poor heart! Sometimes it wants to turn away from the light and to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; sometimes it is weary with the paradise of thy grace and love, and it yearns to spend a night in the wilderness of its own passions: Lord, pity me, for the very atmosphere weighs upon me like a burden, and life is a mystery of pain. It takes all such prayer to save a man in the extremities of temptation. Sometimes he must be nothing but prayer; he must be an embodied supplication, an incarnate cry. Only they know this who have felt the devil's grip, who have felt the nearness of hell's burning, and who know how terrific a thing it is for the heart to be set on fire from below. One man cannot set himself against another in this matter. "The mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth himself:" the great man cannot stand aside, and say, I am not as others; the mean man cannot say, This is the lot only of those who are weak, and I must blame my circumstances for my apostasy. The mean man and the great man, the strong life and the weak life, the king and the fair woman and the little child are all involved in a common collapse. We must not speak of human nature in these separate details, but must regard it in its solidarity, and when Adam fell all men fell in him. But if this be the dark side of the picture, is there not a corresponding brightness? Is there not a second Adam greater than the first, a new humanity, a redeeming revelation, a saving, atoning personage? Hear the great solemn bell of history tolling out these words: "In Adam all die"; and then hear the silver trumpets of the sky delivering this gracious message, this hopeful, animating, eternal word: "In Christ shall all be made alive." The sentence is thus balanced: there is a universality on the one hand, and an impartiality on the other. The ways of the Lord are equal.
From the tenth verse we come upon the description of an earthquake. This is indeed an Old Testament passage. God is going now to judge the earth, and shake it terribly. Who can stand when he cometh?
"The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of men shall be bowed down, and the Lord alone shall be exalted in that day. For the day of the Lord of hosts shall be upon every one that is proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought low' ( Isa 2:11-12 ).
How poor is man when he is contrasted with that right quality! How great when compared with himself! Some men tall, others short of stature; some men wise, others not wise; some rich, others poor; some very great, and others obscure and insignificant and nothing accounted of; judged amongst themselves, all these comparisons are legitimate and are significant, but when man is set side by side with the God that made him, how are the lofty crushed down, how are the mighty brought into conscious weakness, how are all inequalities levelled in one pitiable and impotent monotony! That is the right standard of judgment. Comparing ourselves amongst ourselves we become wise; but comparing ourselves with the righteousness of God we are ashamed of our morality, and we even withdraw our prayers from divine attention. When the Lord ariseth to shake terribly the earth, what can men do? We have had such visitations, call them natural phenomena if you like, the argument still remains intact what can man do even in the hour of the manifestation of "natural phenomena," if we like that phrase better than "the visitation of God"? Is the situation eased by describing an earthquake as a natural phenomenon? What can the judges do then, robed and seated in elevated positions, reading with piercing eyes the law of the country what can they say when the court rocks to and fro because of the upheaval of the earth? What can the soldier do when the earth trembles under his feet? Helmeted with shield and spear, and all the panoply of war upon him, what can he do? Where is the sword that can strike an earthquake? where is the spear that can affright a natural phenomenon, and make it an obedient slave? What is the difference between a military commander and the frailest life that flutters at the grave's edge, even under the visitation of a "natural phenomenon"? By eliminating the word "God" you do not get rid of the natural phenomenon; by seizing that word and turning it to its finest uses, you may have peace and comfort even when the mountains are removed into the midst of the sea; but you do not get rid of the pain, peril, mystery, and whole possibility of ruin simply by taking the word "God" out of the tragic mystery of nature.
Will God, then, alone be great in relation to man? No, his greatness will show itself everywhere: not only shall men be put down in their pride, but nature shall be dwarfed:
"And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, and upon all the high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up" ( Isa 2:13-14 ).
Nature shall be dwarfed when the Lord ariseth to shake terribly the earth. All the worlds are in the hollow of his hand; all the constellations are but flecks of light; all the marvels of the stellar presences that enrich the sky and make a mystery of it are but as a drop of the bucket So man shall be brought low, and nature shall be humbled, and civilisation itself shall be abased:
"And upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, and upon all the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures" ( Isa 2:15-16 ).
All shall go down in the tremendous cataclysm! Then shall men hold their idols in contempt "The idols he shall utterly abolish." What! Will he not spare one of them? Not one. Not the golden ones? No. Not the proofs of human ingenuity and invention? No: he shall utterly abolish: he shall blow with his mouth, and they shall flee away; he shall shake his hand at them, and they shall appear no more. All this is not prophecy, but history. Here we have a case set forth in high religious terms, in almost poetic imagery; but the kernel is solid and true, and is part of our own experience to-day. Let us waive for a moment the idea of literal earthquakes. There are earthquakes of another kind, if we may so accommodate the expression. There have been times in our experience when mighty men have gone down, and lofty men have been brought low, and when cedar and oak were of no consequence to us, and when the idols we have praised and trusted the most we have the most detested: we have hidden them; we have put them out of the way; we have turned to look in some kind of cowardly manner for a fire into which we might thrust them; we have been ashamed of our false religions and our false confidences. We claim, therefore, that this is not a romantic passage, ancient Hebrew poetry, but that in the sub-tone of it it is historical, experimental, as modern as our own consciousness and the facts of our own life. What visitations we have had! What tremendous commercial upheavals! What shaking of social confidences! What distrust has been created in us regarding even the highest in the land! How we have seen the very props of society rotting before our vision, and how sometimes have we been inclined to pronounce all men vanity and lies! Again and again in history we have been made to see that man at his best estate is not to be trusted. "Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?" In the midst of all this tempest of wrath and elemental shock and social dismay man will turn from man, cease from him, be conscious of his littleness and helplessness, and shall cry to the living God. The paint will be taken off, and the natural hideousness will be made to appear; the cloak will be torn from the shoulders, and the deformity will be revealed; and men shall be made to know that there is no solidity of character except in co-operation with God, identification with the living God, and the cultivation of the righteousness which Christ revealed, embodied, and made possible. Do not let us be content with promises, social arrangements, appearances, simulations; this is the fact, and the pulpit must declare it, and the Christian Church must affirm it, that there is no character that can stand pressure for a moment but the character that is inspired by the living One, and sustained by the Eternal. Nominal professors will often go wrong; not a living man but has done wrong in numberless instances, and will probably repeat all his wickedness and all his faults; but human shortcomings do not alter the reality of the internal argument, which is, that no man can be right except he is first right with God, and no man can be made right with God except through him who is the Way, the Truth, the Life the blood-stained way, the way of sacrifice, atonement, and propitiation. When men are in the Son of God they are safe. When they are out of him they are not only unsafe they are lost!
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