p. 618Turning from the “players with fire,” the prophet, by the spirit of Christ which was in him, calls to the Israel of God: “Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit (quarry) whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him and increased him. For the Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody” (Isa. li. 1-3).
The people to whom this beautiful exhortation is addressed are very particularly described, in the context and throughout the chapter: “Ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord” (v. 1); “My people . . . my nation” (v. 4); “Ye that know righteousness, the people in whose heart is my law” (v. 7). These are Abraham’s true children, whether they be his natural descendants, or “his seed” by adoption in Christ. Apart from the faith and works of Abraham, fleshly descent counts for nothing. “We be Abraham’s seed,” said the Jews to Jesus, though they rejected God’s truth which he taught them. But he repudiated their claim altogether: “If ye were Abraham’s children,” said he, “ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. . . . Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do” (John viii.).
These were not the people addressed by God in the place in question. They could not appropriate the prophetic word, as p. 619 was manifest in their treatment of Jesus. But a remnant received him and learnt the truth at his mouth, and inherited the freedom he promised. The Galilean fishermen whom he called to his side were the type of people addressed, and the true “seed of Abraham.” And those who have learnt “the truth” in turn by their word are of the same family, and in proportion as they “follow after righteousness,” and “hide the law of God in their heart,” so they can extract strength and comfort from the words of their brethren, the prophets who have gone before.
A knowledge of “the truth” naturally brings obedience to the divine exhortation: “Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you.” Ever since Abraham’s day “the truth” has begotten an earnest desire on the part of its children to see the fulfilment of the promises that God made to him. The prophets themselves are emphatic on the point. Micah exults in the prospect, saying, “Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, the mercy to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old” (Mic. vii. 20). The rejoicing over the birth of John the Baptist as the forerunner of the Seed, goes back upon “the oath which he sware to our father Abraham” (Luke i. 73). A paganised theology has distracted attention from the Life and Land covenants that God made with Abraham, and has substituted the modified fables of the Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, with their notions of “shades” surviving the death of the body and departing to their “hades,” “fields of peace,” and so forth, the location of which no one has ever been able to define.
But, “look unto Abraham.” God called him out from Ur of the Chaldees where he was an idolater (Josh. xxiv. 2). And He called him into the Promised Land and declared that He would give him all of it for ever (Gen. xiii.). Also that all families of the earth should be blessed in his seed, which, says Paul, “is Christ” (Gal. iii.). The times were disturbed and Abraham was “alone.” Lot, his nephew, was carried off in war; but Abraham armed a retinue and recovered him, and was blessed on his return by Melchizedek, king of Salem, to whom he gave “tithes of all.”
p. 620 For ten years Abraham went childless; but God assured him of His purpose and directed him to look at the stars, saying, “So shall thy seed be. And he believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. xv.). And thus, says Paul, Abraham was justified by faith (Rom. iv.). At the end of the ten years Ishmael was born of Hagar (Gen. xvi.), but he was not the seed; and Hagar was cast out before the child was born because of her presumption and Sarah’s jealousy; and fourteen years afterwards, having returned from her first short exile, she was cast out with her son, who mocked at Isaac, and returned no more.
This was after about 25 years’ sojourn in the Land, and after the covenant of circumcision. Isaac was born when Abraham was 100 years old and Sarah 90—a very unlikely thing from a natural point of view; but “is anything too hard for the Lord?” It was after this that Ishmael was cast out. Then, when Isaac was grown, God commanded Abraham to offer him up for a burnt offering on the mountain which He appointed. Abraham obeyed:— “By faith Abraham when he was tried, offered up Isaac; and he that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said that ‘In Isaac shall thy seed be called;’ accounting that God was able to raise him up even from the dead, from whence also he received him in a figure” (Heb. xi. 17-19). Thus he was justified by works. “Was not Abraham our Father justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar? Thou seest how faith wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect. And the scripture was fulfilled which saith, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was imputed unto him for righteousness’; and he was called ‘The Friend of God.’ Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” (Jas. ii. 21-24).
Then Sarah died, and was buried in the sepulchre, in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, which Abraham purchased from the sons of Heth. And lastly, Abraham himself died, knowing that his seed should sojourn in a strange land, and at the end of 400 years should come again into the land of his sojournings; and believing with all his heart that he would at last rise from the dead to inherit it for ever with Christ, his Seed. “Your father p. 621 Abraham,” said Jesus to the Jews, “rejoiced to see my day; and he saw it, and was glad” (John viii. 56).
Therefore, “Look unto Abraham,” as Jesus himself did in his day. Like Abraham, he was called “alone,” but “blessed and increased.” Who knows but this very passage may not have been the subject of converse between himself and the angels, who at times “ministered unto him,” and “strengthened him”? The offering up of Isaac was but a parable of the offering of the Lamb of God afterwards on the same mountain. What more personally strengthening than for him to contemplate the obedience of his prototype and the emphatic oath of blessedness that followed? (Gen. xxii. 14-18). What more encouraging, in view of the agonies of crucifixion, than this ancient declaration, “Thy Seed shall possess the gate of His enemies?”
And the body of Christ as well as Jesus himself is exhorted to “Look unto Abraham.” Are they “called out from country and kindred?” So was Abraham. Are they few and feeble in the midst of enemies and war’s alarms? So was Abraham. Are their prayers for years apparently unheeded, and hope deferred till despair almost threatens? So it was with Abraham. Is the promise of life so far outside the bounds of human probability that it stirs incredulity? So it was with Abraham. Do they believe against all appearances? So did Abraham; and as he was justified by faith so are they, when, upon belief of the gospel of the kingdom, they are baptised into Christ for the remission of sins. Do they wrestle against fleshly affections and desires and crucify the old man with Christ? “Look at Abraham” offering up Isaac, and receiving him back, as it were, from the dead. Do they look for the day when the heathen shall be expelled from the land before an avenging generation of Israel under a Joshua who shall give them rest? So did Abraham till he closed his eyes in death.
Such is the “rock” whence the true Israel is hewn — the “quarry” whence the stones for the temple are “digged.” Only the truth reveals the matter as it really is, and introduces us to the fellowship of the fathers, the prophets and apostles.
When Abraham sojourned in the Land it was full of “waste places,” wildernesses and deserts literally and metaphorically, and p. 622 though it had in Isaiah’s time been subdued by Israel, and under the kingdom in the days of David and Solomon become comparatively a paradise; there was still a long period of desolation in store. Zion has now been comfortless, and her land waste and desolate for many days. Her crowning iniquity in crucifying Christ has brought it about as he said it would; but the vision hath an end, and he is about to return to establish the Kingdom of God in joy and gladness in her midst.
This is the true paradise of the prophets—the “Eden” or “garden of Yahweh” of which they speak. The clerical speculations on Paradise, which have nothing to do with Zion’s “waste places” or the land of Abraham’s sojourning which God promised him for ever, are mere sublimated paganism. One of the speculators has recently given, as the result of the distillation of his wisdom from beneath, the following ripe conclusion: “So Paradise is Hades, but all Hades is not Paradise; just as Abraham’s bosom was Hades, but there was a part of Hades which certainly was not Abraham’s bosom.”
Now the writer of this does not “look unto Abraham” or he would know better than to write such pagan nonsense. The notions concerning Abraham’s bosom in Hades were held, as Josephus shows us in his “Discourse upon Hades,” by the Jewish leaders of the first century, who were not the true seed of Abraham at all, but, as Jesus told them, the children of the devil, and blind leaders of the blind. That he should adopt their phraseology in a parable in which he made Abraham condemn them (Lu. xvi.) is only in harmony with the declared fact that he spoke to them in parables because, on account of their blindness and disobedience, it was not given them to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. xiii. 11). And if they did not know, why need we trouble with their stupidities concerning Paradise and Hades? Let us “look to Abraham.”
Paradise is where Adam was made, and whence he was exiled. That is not Hades. Eden was the territory in the East, and the “garden eastward in Eden” was “the garden of Yahweh” where Elohim held peaceful converse with our first parents before p. 623 Hades was even dreamt of by them. Hades is simply the grave, the invisible, and no such “place of departed spirits” as is popularly imagined. Abraham sojourned in Eden (though not in the garden of Eden) just as afterwards the King of Tyre shone there in regal splendour (Ezek. xxviii. 13). It is the place of these ancient sojournings, and rivalries and tragedies, that is to become a Paradise “in the regeneration, when the Son of Man shall sit upon the throne of his glory.” And Abraham will be there, and so will be these Pharisees and others who withstood Jesus in the days of his flesh, for, he said: “Ye shall see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out.”
This suggests the new heavens and earth that the prophet speaks of in this place, and which are to take the place of those that he says shall pass away. In verse 6, God’s people are addressed, saying, “Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath, for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner; but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness shall not be abolished.” And in verse 16, ONE is addressed, saying, “I have put my words in thy mouth, and I have covered thee in the shadow of my hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people.”
The Founder of the New Order in Zion is Christ, in whose mouth the Father’s words were found challenging the attention and admiration even of his enemies. The language here is akin to that of ch. xlix. 2, already considered. It is Yahweh’s work through Christ that is before us. He is “the arm of the Lord” (Yahweh), to plant the heavens.
The “heavens and earth to vanish away” are of course those of Israel under the Mosaic economy, of which Christ and the apostles often spoke. Jesus, on the Mount of Olives, spoke of this crisis “and the days of vengeance, that all things which were written might be fulfilled” (Luke xxi. 22; Matt. xxiv. 29). And he declared, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Paul, who wrote p. 624 many years afterwards, referred to the same thing, saying, “That which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away” (Heb. viii. 13); that is the Mosaic or “old covenant,” in the judgments that were coming upon the Jewish nation. Peter also speaks of “the heavens and earth that are now,” which, says he, are “by the same word (of God) kept in store and reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Pet. iii. 7). The contrast in Peter’s allusion is between the Antediluvian heavens and earth or “world of the ungodly” that had been destroyed in Noah’s day, and the Mosaic heavens and earth or Jewish “world of the ungodly” that was destroyed by Titus in A.D. 70. Of course, the literal heavens and earth remained unchanged through all these fleeting generations of mortality. The contrast also is made between the Mosaic heavens and earth and the Messianic “wherein dwelleth righteousness” (2 Pet. iii. 13). In the old heavens and earth dwelt wickedness, and not righteousness, and therefore they were destroyed. But the apostles and their brethren looked for the “new heavens and new earth, according to God’s promise”; that is such as here found in this fifty-first chapter of Isaiah, and more plainly still in ch. lxv. 17.
Christ is the Sun of the new heavens, and his Bride is the Moon, and her constituent units, by another figure, the stars, like Joseph’s brethren in his celebrated dream (Gen. xxxvii. 9). For “they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Dan. xii. 3). And “then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. xiii. 43). It is Christ who establishes the kingdom of the Father upon earth, and centrally in Zion. This is how Yahweh by His hand “plants the heavens and lays the foundation of the earth, and says unto Zion, “Thou art my people.”
In view of this great and glorious transformation, those that “know righteousness” and in whose heart is God’s law, are encouraged against the reproach of men and their revilings. p. 625 “For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool.” In this place these words are the exhortation of Yahweh to His people. In the previous chapter (l. 9), they are enthusiastically adopted by His Servant: “My Lord Yahweh will help me; who is he that shall condemn me? Lo they all shall wax old as doth a garment; the moth shall eat them up.” We look back—where are those who condemned Jesus? Eaten up in sheol. But where is he? “Helped” and exalted to the Father’s right hand, and made strong for ever for the glorious work he is yet to accomplish on earth. Truly his “salvation is from generation to generation.”
Then the theme changes, and we have as it were a prayer of the prophet (and more remotely of Christ) in the experiencing of the reproaches and revilings of men. It says, “Awake, awake, put on strength O arm of the Lord: Awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art not thou it that hath cut Rahab (Egypt)? and wounded the dragon (the crocodile, the symbol of Egypt)? Art not thou it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over.”
These references to the mighty works of old “in the ancient days” are valuable as indicating at once the currency of the Law of Moses, and the faith of the prophets as based upon it. In this chapter alone there are references to “Eden,” “the garden of the Lord,” Abraham and Sarah, the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea. A very convincing answer to some of the theories of modern criticism can be developed on the lines of a study of the Law in the prophets. The Bible is an historical development, and cannot be pulled to pieces in the way that some have attempted. Moses is the foundation, and upon “Moses’ writings” all that comes afterwards is founded. Those who would make the Pentateuch not “Moses’ writings,” but the work of a number of unknown “editors” of comparatively modern date, run counter to all the facts of the case, and involve themselves in endless confusion, besides reflecting upon the judgment of the Lord Jesus himself.
p. 626 It was because of Zion’s helplessness and the absence of any deliverer that Christ was appointed to save her. This is a challenge to merely human prowess. Those who can see no further than man may boast of Jewish intellect, Jewish continuity in the midst of adversity, Jewish faithfulness and so forth; but where is the Jew who is sufficient for the present situation? Who will undertake to “plant the heavens and lay the foundations of the earth” for Zion? Her sons have but brought her to desolation, and there is none to comfort her but Jesus. He has declared he will do so: “Behold your house is left unto you desolate, and ye shall see me no more henceforth until ye shall say, ‘Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.’”
It is he who shall take the cup of trembling out of Zion’s hand and give it into the hand of her tormentors. He has revealed the principles upon which it will be done. He will gather the kings of the earth against Jerusalem in war, and will overthrow them and wrest his city from their grasp. We see the situation preparing. A Zionist movement for the restoration of the Jews is attracting the attention of all the Great Powers, who all have “interests” of one sort and another in the Holy Land. Up to a certain crisis the manipulation of these rival interests is apparently human and nothing else; but at last the hand of God is revealed as it was in the days of Joshua, and more gloriously still, for in the last crisis of Jerusalem’s degradation, “the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee” (Zech. xiv. 5).