Isaiah 10:1-4

The Knell of Doom

Isa 9:1 to Isa 10:4

There is a very striking expression in the Isaiah 9:11 : "The Lord shall set up the adversaries." "Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?" Does God employ evil spirits, evil men? Is it true that he maketh the wrath of man to praise him, and that he restrains the remainder thereof, and keeps it back for use upon occasion? Does he use up the very hell which sin has made, turning its heat into uses intended for judgment and penalty, and through this process intended also for repentance and reclamation? It is a wonderful universe. "The Lord shall set up the adversaries." This accounts for many oppositions which otherwise would be without explanation. We wonder why such and such people should be opposed to us; on the face of the occasion there is nothing to account for the hostility; in fact, there may be possibly something which ought to operate in another direction, making them rather friends and comrades than enemies; yet there they are, in battle array, looking upon us jealously, speaking of us falsely, endeavouring to ensnare our steps, to frustrate our purposes, and to make our life a misery. Attempt to conciliate them, and all your approaches do but add to the malignity of their detestation. We are not to look upon these things as merely human, coming and going by an uncalculated law, an operation of chance or fortuity; we are to ask for discerning eyes that look beneath surfaces, and find the spring of causes. The people themselves, too, are at a loss to explain their hostility: they cannot give reasons in regular numeration, gathering themselves up into a final and representative reason; yet they know that their hearts are simply set against us in a deadly attitude. Ask them questions about this opposition, and they will confess themselves bewildered; they daily look round for causes, and find none; yet they say they cannot restrain the dislike, and they must force it into forms of opposition about whose urgency and determinateness there can be no mistake. How is all this? Is it not the Lord reigning even here? God means to chasten us, to make us feel that there are other people in the world beside ourselves, and that we have no right to all the room, and no claim that can be maintained to all the property. Thus we teach one another by sometimes opposing one another. We are brought to chastening and sobriety and refinement by attritions and oppositions that are, from a human point of view, utterly unaccountable. The Bible never hesitates to trace the whole set and meaning of providence to the Lord himself: he sends the plague, the pestilence, the darkness, all the flies and frogs that desolated old Egypt; he still is the Author of gale, and flood, and famine, and pestilence. We have amused ourselves by deceiving ourselves, by discovering a thousand secondary causes, and seeking, piously or impiously, to relieve providence of the responsibility of the great epidemic. Within given limits all we say may be perfectly true; we are great in phenomena, we have a genius in the arrangement of detail; but, after all, above all, and beneath all, is the mysterious life, the omnipotence of God, the judgment between right and wrong that plays upon the universe as upon an obedient instrument, now evoking from it black frowning thunder, and now making it tremble with music that children love, and that sweetest mothers want all their babes to hear. Who can be so gentle, so condescending, so tender as the everlasting Father?

In this section we come upon a word which may be regarded as a refrain "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still" ( Isa 9:12 ). In the seventeenth verse the refrain is repeated; in the twenty-first verse we find it again; and once more ( Isa 10:4 ) the solemn words roll in upon our attention: "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still." There must be some cause for this. Is the cause concealed? On the contrary, it is written in boldest capitals, so that the dimmest eyes may see it all, in every palpitating, burning syllable. Let us make ourselves acquainted with the cause, lest we judge God harshly by wondering that his hand should be stretched out in judgment rather than stretched out that he may touch the nations with a sceptre of mercy.

"The people turneth not unto him that smiteth them" ( Isa 9:13 ). That is one element of the cause of this judgment. They do not kiss the rod: they see it to be a rod only; they do not understand that judgment is the severe aspect of mercy, and that without mercy there could be no real judgment. There might be condemnation, destruction, annihilation, but "judgment" is a combined or compound term, involving in all its rich music every possible utterance of law and grace and song and hope. Why do we not turn to him who smites us, and kiss the rod; yea, kiss the hand that wields it? Why do we not say, Thy judgments are true and righteous altogether, thou Lord most High: health gone, chairs vacated, fireside emptied; all is right, and all is hard to bear: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord? Yea, the submissive heart may go further, and say, I have no right to any tittle that has been taken from me; it was really not mine; the mistake was that I thought it belonged to me, and that I could establish a claim to its proprietorship and retention: whereas I see now that I have nothing that I have not received, that I never had anything that was not given to me or lent to me, or of which I was not put in trust and stewardship. Thou hast taken it all away; I know it is not because I have prayed too much, but because I have sinned beyond measure. When a man thus kisses the hand that wields the rod, the rod blossoms, and God's judgment becomes God's grace.

"The leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that are led of them are destroyed" ( Isa 9:16 ).

That is another explanation of the cause. The displeasure is not superficial or incidental, involving only a few of the weaker sort of people; the displeasure has attacked the very centres of social dignity, social thought, and social influence. The leaders have fallen: what can the followers do? Howl, fir tree, for the cedar has fallen. In ancient times the people were accustomed to put the statues of their princes and leaders close to fountains and springing waters; they thought the association good, the alliance seemed to be natural and suggestive: for these men were fountains of pure water, springs of wisdom, and judgment, and righteousness; all their thought was clear as crystal, and the uprising of their life was as water that came from a rocky bed, untainted, refreshing. The idea was excellent. People who had such conceptions regarding their princes, leaders, and legislators were likely to yield themselves to whatever influence such mighty men exerted. When, therefore, the leader went astray, the whole procession followed him, because they had confidence in him. "I command, therefore," said one who spoke with authority, "that prayer be made for all men" for princes, governors, rulers, magistrates, judges, ministers of state, conductors of the journals of the time; for all men who have the eloquent tongue, the facile pen, moral, intellectual, social, that leadership may be purified, and that under a sanctified directorate the whole nation may move on in the direction of righteousness, equity, love of truth, moral frankness, and abounding, yea boundless, charity.

"Every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly"( Isa 9:17 ).

This is a continuation of the explanation of the cause of the divine judgment. Mark the completeness of the statement: it is "every one." We have read elsewhere, "There is none righteous, no, not one." We are familiar with the expression that the Lord looked down from heaven to see if there were any that were righteous and that did good, and whose thoughts were towards himself in all the simplicity of trust and in all the ardour of prayer, and he himself, reporting upon the moral state of the world, said, They have all turned aside. In our high confessions, sometimes perhaps thoughtlessly, yet after a moment's reflection most thoughtfully, we have said, "All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way." "Every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly." Does not the word "folly" seem to be too weak a word with which to conclude that indictment? "Hypocrite," "evildoer," "folly" does not the series run in the wrong direction? So it may appear in the translation, but the word for "folly" should be "blasphemy." "Every one is an hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh blasphemy:" the world has become brazen-faced in iniquity, shameless in sin; an oath shall now be uttered where once it would only have been whispered, and men shall speak openly of forbidden things as if they were talking the conventional language of the day. The devil drives his scholars fast; he does not keep school for nothing; he means to turn out experts; he listens to our profane rhetoric, and in proportion as we become eloquent in the utterance of his language does he give us prize, and certificate, and honour, and write down our names in the list of those who have taken high positions in the examinations of hell. "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still." That is right. If his anger had been turned away, he would not have been God; if his hand had not been stretched out, even farther and farther still in presence of such wickedness, then he would have forfeited his right to sit upon the throne of the universe. God cannot yield; righteousness can never compound; there is no compromise in truth: the whole controversy must be settled upon principles that are fundamental, all-involving, and eternal, and then it will be for ever settled.

The Lord will show how the judgment will take effect "Therefore the Lord will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day" ( Isa 9:14 ). The explanation is given partly in Isaiah 9:15 , "The ancient and honourable, he is the head; and the prophet that teacheth lies, he is the tail." "Branch and rush" the allusion is to the beauteous palm-tree: it shall be cut down notwithstanding its beauty; and the "rush" the common growths round about it, entangled roots, poor miserable shrubs that crowd and cumber the earth branch and rush cannot stand before God's sword and fire: everything that is wrong goes down in a common destruction. Judgment obliterates our classifications. When judgment begins at the house of God, the meanest man and the loftiest go for nothing before the fire of that holy wrath. It is well that now and again all our classifications should be destroyed. We have made too much of them; we have designated this and that as reputable and respectable and good, whereas it was only relatively such, and not really. When God arises to shake terribly the earth, tower, and temple, and town, and meanest hut, all reel under the tremendous shock. "God is no respecter of persons." He will not spare the corrupt judge and punish the meaner criminals; rather will he say, The greater the criminal's advantages the meaner is the criminal himself: he ought to have known better; he had every opportunity of knowing better; he sinned away his advantages, and therefore his downfall could be none to mitigate or deplore.

"The Lord shall have no joy in their young men" ( Isa 9:17 ).

The meaning is full of suggestion. God delights in the young. God has made the young a ministry of instruction and comfort to old age. God keeps the world young by keeping children in it, and helpless ones. But God shall cease to see in young men any hope for the future. Once he would have done so, saying, The young men will keep the world right: they are strong, they are pure-minded, they are enthusiastic; their youthful, sometimes exuberant, zeal and influence will keep things as they ought to be kept. But henceforth God withdraws from the young, and they become old; he takes from them his all-vitalising and all-blessing smile, and they wither as flowers die when the sun turns away.

Sin was to be left to be its own punishment. Here we come upon a paragraph full of mournful interest. The whole work shall be left to sin itself. "No man shall spare his brother" ( Isa 9:19 ). How often have we seen when men have fallen into wrong relations to God they have fallen also into wrong relations to one another; all pledges are broken up, all covenants are destroyed, all understandings as to concession and compromise and give-and-take, all these things disappear, and man flies at the throat of man like wild beast at wild beast. How man can sink! Why can he sink so far? Because he has risen so high: the inverted tree we see in the calm lake indicates the height of that tree as it lifts itself up towards the welcoming and blessing sun. "He shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied" ( Isa 9:20 ). This is the mockery of God. This is how God taunts men. "They shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm." A man shall play the cannibal upon himself. Literally, every man shall fly at every other man's arm, and every man shall be eating human flesh, for there is nothing else to eat.

Then, too, there is to be internecine war: Manasseh shall fly at Ephraim, and Ephraim at Manasseh, and they who could agree upon nothing between themselves always agree in flying together against Judah. This is what wickedness will bring the world to to murder, to mutual hatred and distrust, to perdition. We do not understand the power of wickedness, because at present, owing to religious thinking and action and moral civilisation, there are so many mitigating circumstances, so many relieving lights; but wickedness in itself let loose upon the earth, and the earth is no longer the abode of green thing, of fair flower, or singing bird, of mutual trust and love: it becomes a pandemonium. If we could consider this deeply, it would make us solemn. We do not consider it; we are prepared to allow it as a theory or a conjecture, but the realisation of it is kept far from us. The wicked man kills himself; puts his teeth into the flesh of his own arm, and gnaws it with the hunger of a wild beast. That is what wickedness comes to! It is not an intellectual error, not a slight and passing mistake, not a lapse of judgment, or a momentarily lamentable act of misconduct which can easily be repaired: the essence of wickedness is destruction. Wickedness would no sooner hesitate to kill a little child than to snap a flower. The thing that keeps the world from suicide is the providence of God. Were God to take away the restraining influences which are keeping society together, society would fall into mutual enmity, and the controversy could only end in mutual death. "For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still" ( Isa 9:21 ). Do not blame the judgment, blame the sin; do not say, How harsh is God, say, How corrupt, how blasphemous is man!

"Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed" ( Isa 10:1 ).

The Lord's voice is always for righteousness. What is it that is denounced? It is the very thing that is to be denounced evermore. There is nothing local or temporary in this cause of divine offence. The Lord is against all unrighteous decrees, unnatural alliances, and evil compacts. This is the very glory of the majesty of omnipotence, that it is enlisted against every form of evil and wrong. Then "Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed" scribes or registrars who preserve all the forms of the court, and keep their pens busy upon the court register, writing down every case, and appearing to do the business correctly and thoughtfully; and yet all the while these very registrars were themselves plotting "to take away the right from the poor, that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless." The court of law was turned into a means of robbery, as it is in nearly every country under the sun. The scribes who wrote down the law were men who secretly or overtly broke it; the judge used his ermine as a cloak, that under its concealment he might thrust his hand further into the property of those who had no helper. "For all this his anger is not turned away." Blessed be his name! Oh, burn thou against us all; mighty, awful, holy God, burn more and more, until we learn by fire what we can never learn by pity. The Lord speaks evermore for the poor, for the widow, for the fatherless, for the helpless. Here we pause, as we have often done before in these readings, to say, How grand is the moral tone of the Bible; how sweetly does God speak for truth and righteousness; how condescendingly does he enlist omnipotence on the side of innocent helplessness.

Now we come upon an awful irony:

"What will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help? and where will ye leave your glory?" ( Isa 10:3 ).

This is more difficult to bear than was the fire of judgment this spectral tone, this irony from behind the clouds, this mockery that makes our marrow cold. "What will ye do?" What is your last resource? When it becomes your turn to play in this great game, what move will you take? That hour comes in all life. For a long time men can be moving to and fro, and changing their position, and trying their policy, and deceiving even the very elect by the agility of their movements; but there comes a time when the last step must be taken, the last hand must be shown, the last declaration must be made. You have sinned away so the impeachment would seem to say the day of judgment; you have mocked righteousness; you have turned the sanctuary into a school of blasphemy; you have robbed the poor, the widow, the fatherless; you have trodden down every thing of beauty that God planted upon the earth, and you would have blackened the stars with night if your evil hands could have reached them! Now there has come the critical moment of agony, and the question is, "What will ye do?" Now for genius, now for the fine intellectual stroke, now for the stroke that will settle everything your own way what is it? Open your right hand, and it contains emptiness; your left, and it is rich with nothingness. "What will ye do?" You have sworn every oath, and the very familiarity of your irreverence has turned your blasphemy stale. "What will ye do?" Bribe? You have nothing in the treasure-house, and your money is not current coin with this reckoning. "What will ye do?" Confess? Too late: that would be a coward's trick. "What will ye do?" That same question occurs in the Christian books "How shall we escape if we neglect so great salvation?" That question is HOW?

Note

"The whole passage, from the fifth verse of chap. x. to the end of chap, xii., should be read together, beginning with the solemn denunciation, as the title to the whole, of 'Woe to Asshur!' Assyria, in all its pride, was but a rod in the hands of Jehovah, and when the appointed work of judgment was done, the instrument of that judgment, worthless in itself, would be cast away and destroyed.... Then follows a description of the Assyrian's march upon Jerusalem, which, says Delitzsch, 'aesthetically considered, is one of the most magnificent that human poetry has ever produced.' It is also very interesting to the reader of modern days, inasmuch as it clears up a difficulty which most earlier expositors had felt, and enables us by means of the Assyrian monuments to add another to the 'undesigned' confirmations of Scripture. It has been usual to refer the account of this march to the history of Sennacherib, in Hezekiah's later days, after the capture of Lachish [2 Kings 18:13-17 ; Isa 36:1-2 ]. But then, it has been remarked, Sennacherib advanced from the south-west, i.e. from the road leading to Egypt; while the route so vividly described by the prophet is from the north-east. Expositors therefore have generally contented themselves with calling the description 'ideal.' It depicts such an approach as the Assyrian king might have made, had he come from that quarter! But now we know that there was another invasion before that of Sennacherib." Rev. S. G. Green, D.P.