p. 58The prophecy that is commenced in the second chapter of Isaiah extends to the end of chapter iv. It must be considered as a whole, and in the relation of all its parts, before it becomes perfectly intelligible. The usual method of treating it obscures this intelligibility. The usual way is to regard the first five verses of chapter ii. as a detached idyll in the midst of commonplaces of a bygone application—a sort of island of glorious brightness in a gloomy sea. In reality, it is the prologue of a complete discourse which hangs together in logical coherence in all its parts. We shall see this.
The general topic is fixed and settled for us by the opening sentence, which is in the nature of a chapter heading prefixed by inspiration: “The word that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” Realising that Isaiah was an inhabitant of Jerusalem, and that Jerusalem was the capital of the kingdom of Judah, there can be no difficulty in having clearly before the mind what it is that Isaiah is going to talk about. He is going to discourse about a word or vision shown to him concerning the future of the Jerusalem in which he dwelt, and the Judah in which he lived his life.
The idea that it was any other Jerusalem or any other Judah never entered into men’s minds until the nullifying traditions of Origenism obtained currency in the fourth century. The idea that it is any other is inconsistent with every inspired application of the prophetic word: for there are inspired interpretations which give us a perfect key which we can use with all the more confidence and readiness because they harmonise with what people understand by common-sense. Let three illustrations out of a multitude suffice:—
p. 59 It was foretold (Micah v. 2; Matt. ii. 6) that the Lord should be born in the land of Judah. Let the birth of Christ in Bethlehem determine the meaning.
It was foretold (Micah iii. 12) that Jerusalem should be destroyed and become heaps. Let the Lord’s prophecy of the same (Luke xxi. 24) and the fulfilment thereof as recorded by Josephus and known to all the world, settle the question of what Jerusalem means in prophecy.
It was foretold that the children of Israel should be scattered in all lands in affliction and disgrace: let the presence of the Jewish people in every country to the present day decide what the prophecy meant.
The future that Isaiah saw “concerning Judah and Jerusalem” was a very extended one, and one drawn out from his own day forward, and embracing the prolonged era of trouble that was waiting for them, as well as the age of glory in which that era should culminate. But the last is placed first: “It shall come to pass in the last days that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow unto it.”
There are two points here: 1, “The last days,” and 2, The exaltation of a certain “mountain” above all mountains. As for the first, the meaning is not to be found in the phrase itself, but in its associations. Everything terminable has its last days. You have the last days of Pompeii: the last days of the Venetian Republic. So there are in Scripture the “last days” of the Mosaic order of things, styled “these last days” (Heb. i. 1); and yet other “last days” that were future to the Mosaic last days—days when, says Paul, perilous times should come (2 Tim. iii. 1). It is impossible to fix an invariable meaning to a phrase of this kind. The association determines the meaning. Last days of what? The context will usually answer. It is evident in the case in question that it is the last days of Judah and Jerusalem as a mortal institution upon the earth—days that merge into an immortal constitution of everlasting day.
The things to happen show this to be the meaning. Mount Zion is to be exalted above all hills, and nations are to rally there for worship and instruction: “Many people shall go and say, Come ye p. 60 and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob: and he will teach us of his ways, and we shall walk in his paths.” This has never happened yet. The currents have been in the opposite direction altogether. Nations have not wanted to come to Zion. Repulsion, not attraction, has been the law. Zion has been broken up, and the nations have gone their own evil ways. The Jews have been hated of all nations, and they have “eaten their defiled bread” in dispersion “among the Gentiles.” But at the time in contemplation, Zechariah informs us that “ten men out of all the nations shall lay hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew and shall say, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you” (Zech. viii. 23), and by Zephaniah God says, “I will get them praise and fame in every land where they have been put to shame” (Zeph. iii. 19).
Some have put a literal meaning on the statement: “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established on the top of the mountains and exalted above the hills.” They have imagined that the hill on which the temple will stand will have such an elevation above the surrounding country as to be visible hundreds of miles off in all directions. There are several objections to this. That there will be physical changes in the Holy Land when the Kingdom of God is set up, is unquestionable: but that the exaltation of Zion spoken of in this prophecy is exaltation in a figurative sense, is determined both by the evident sense and fitness of things, and by the prevalent usage of Scripture.
First, as to the fitness of things: when nations say “Let us go up,” they do not mean climbing a hill, but going up as men propose to go up to London, which is a very flat city topographically. That which exalts a hill in this sense is political, legal, social, and religious importance. It would not add to this importance to have it twenty times higher than the Peak of Teneriffe—rather otherwise: for visibility and familiarity rather detract from the influence of a seat of power. Concealment adds to influence and power where the real elements of power exist. The exaltation of Zion will consist of its becoming the seat and source of universal law: “The law shall go forth from Zion and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.”
p. 61 Next as to the usage of Scripture: it is a common figure to speak of up and down with regard to power and position. In the matter of Zion’s overthrow for example, “Thou shalt be brought down and shalt speak out of the ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust” (Is. xxix. 4). “The Lord hath cast down from heaven to earth the beauty of Israel” (Lam. ii. 1). In the matter of the removal of obstacles to the work of Christ at his first coming: “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low” (Is. xl. 4). The effectual publicity of the Gospel: “Get thee up into the high mountains” (Is. xl. 9), and so forth. The prophecy before us contemplates the time when, not the Vatican hill nor the hill of the Quirinal, nor the capitol of Washington, but Mount Zion shall be exalted above all hills, overshadowing and eclipsing all human importances, and drawing to itself the universal attention and allegiance of the emancipated nations.
There is a disposition on the part of some to recognise the fulfilment of the prophecy in the emanation of the Gospel from Jerusalem 1,800 years ago. There is a sort of first-sight fitness in this suggestion that runs away with the judgment of those who do not care to look closer. The suggestion disappears altogether when we consider what is involved in the next statement: “He (the Lord) shall judge among the nations and shall rebuke many people, and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Here is cause and effect which find no illustration in the circumstances connected with the preaching of the Gospel: a “judging” and a “rebuking,” resulting in the world of mankind abandoning war. The nations (needless to say) have not abandoned wars, and there has been no “judging” or rebuking of nations connected with the preaching of the Gospel. The object of that preaching was not national but individual: to “take out of them a people for the name of the Lord” (Acts xv. 14), and the means was not judicial or compulsory, but constraining by the influence of an attractive invitation on the basis of voluntary compliance. To judge among and rebuke nations, is to employ political and military measures of compulsion, and that this is what is contemplated here is evident from parallel Scriptures referring to p. 62 the matter. The words of Micah are, “He shall rebuke strong nations afar off” (Mic. iv. 3), and of Isaiah (xvii. 13): “The nations shall rush like the rushing of mighty waters, but God shall rebuke them and they shall flee afar off.”
Every image employed in Scripture to illustrate the matter has the same import, “The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion, rule thou in the midst of thine enemies” (Psa. cx. 2). “Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel” (Psa. ii. 9; Rev. ii. 27). “The stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver and the gold” (Dan. ii. 45). “Out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron, and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God” (Rev. xix. 15).
This “word,” then, that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, exhibits them in the last days of mortal history as the glorified centre of human life upon the earth, to which men gravitate submissively after divine conquests, and radiant from which, they experience the blessedness after which they have striven in vain under every form of self-government—even the blessedness divinely promised from the beginning, and now at this time realised in all the earth.
It is natural, in view of these things, for the prophet to exclaim (verse 5) “O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord.”
But until the arrival of the last days of glory, Israel was to be forsaken: and here are the reasons (verses 6-9), “Therefore hast thou forsaken thy people the house of Jacob—because—(and now consider the reasons: they amount in brief to this, because Israel would lean upon men and not upon God: and because they would copy the ways of men instead of conforming to the law of God)—“Because they be replenished from the east and are soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of strangers. Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures: their land also is 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. And the p. 63 mean man boweth down and the great man humbleth himself: therefore, forgive them not.”
Here is the picture of a busy, active, energetic population, finding pleasure in the things that please natural men, and greatly interested in strangers who had no interest in God, and conforming great and small to the religion that was fashionable in the surrounding countries. That the population so exhibited should have been a nation that God brought out of Egypt and organised for Himself, made it specially criminal. No wonder the retribution would be terrible (verses 10-21): “Enter into the rock and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty. 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. . . . And they shall go into the holes of the rocks and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth. In that day shall a man cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles and to the bats to go into the clefts of the rocks and into the tops of the ragged rocks for fear of the Lord and for the glory of his majesty when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.”
In view of this terrible prospect, there is overwhelming force in the command immediately following (verse 22): “Cease ye from man whose breath is in his nostrils, for wherein is he to be accounted of?” Israel were not ceasing from man but leaning on man, building up on man, “delighting themselves in the children of strangers.” The reminder is that trust in man is vain: he is only a creature of very fragile constitution—holding his life by the breath of his nostrils, which can easily be stopped, and which, stopped or not stopped, will soon stop of itself. But God lives for ever—lives in Himself and by Himself—and has everything at His command. Then, as the prophet exhorts a little further on, “Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.”
Chapter III.—In this, there is no new subject introduced, but only the further statement of the subject spoken of in the finish of chapter p. 64 ii. The “for” with which it commences connects it thus: chapter ii. finishes with the statement that all men would fear in a coming day of trouble, and that wise men should therefore cease taking them into account. Here details are supplied: “For behold the Lord, the Lord of Hosts doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff—the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water—the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet and the ancient, the captain of fifty and the honourable man and the counsellor and the cunning artificer and the eloquent orator.” This is a cutting off of all supplies and a clean sweep of all orders of society—which took place in due course through the long series of calamities—political, military, and physical—to which Israel was subjected—by which, the Jewish nation, the most effective and illustrious of peoples in all that makes a nation great, was brought down to its present barren state.
“And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.” Just so: instead of the noble and capable men that have distinguished their annals in times past, Jewish history in their dispersion shows a long series of childish Rabbinical triflers. To the present day, their head men are glad to imitate Gentile leaders. “The people shall be oppressed every one by another, and every one by his neighbour.” Generally, in other particulars stated, “Jerusalem is ruined and Judah is fallen: because their tongue and their doings are against the Lord, to provoke the eyes of his glory.” It is a thing not hidden, a thing glaringly apparent. “The show of their countenance doth witness against them (a statement most foolishly applied by Hine-ish Anglo-Israelism to a Jewish cast of countenance instead of to a brazen-faced stubbornness that was not ashamed to show wickedness in their faces), they declare their sin as Sodom: they hide it not” (verse 9).
What could there be but woe to such a people? “Woe unto their soul?” Yet the woe was self-inflicted in so far as it was their own ways that brought it. “They have rewarded evil unto themselves.” But, as always, there was a remnant: “Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with him: for they shall eat the fruit of their doings”—not that they would be exempted from the national calamities impending, but that they would be saved out of them all at p. 65 the resurrection, when “Many of them that sleep in the dust should awake to everlasting life” (Dan. xii. 2).
There is a touch of commiseration of the people in view of the fact that their departures from divine law were greatly due to the misleading of blind guides: “O my people, they who lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths . . . The Lord will enter into judgment with the ancients of his people and the princes thereof.” The ground of impeachment is this: “Ye have eaten up the vineyard: the spoil of the poor is in your houses. What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of Hosts” (verses 12-15). Here we have a glimpse of affairs in Israel corresponding in their main features with the modern state of things: a ruling class misleading the community for their own advantage, and a people perishing under such guidance and the divine displeasure hovering over all.
In our day, it is clergy, lawyers, doctors, publicists of all kinds who fatten on the public by their several artificial crafts, and whom the public follow and trust with a blindness of faith amounting to superstition. In Israel, it was priests and princes and pretended prophets who manipulated a gullible people for their own enrichment. There was a little excuse for the gullibility in Israel’s case, because in the beginning of things, the priests and princes were divinely appointed to the leadership. In our day, the leaders are of purely human manufacture. The Lord entered into judgment with Israel’s leaders and brought calamity on them that swept them away. He will do the same with the public Scribes and Pharisees in the modern era when He summons the fowls of heaven on the eve of Armageddon to “eat the flesh of kings and captains, and the flesh of mighty men, . . . and the flesh of all men, free and bond, small and great.”
Then the word of prophetic rebuke turns on the women of Israel who took a leading part in the ways that brought God’s displeasure on the nation. The part they performed was different from that condemned in the priests and rulers. It was a part in their own line of things. They were not unprincipled traders and oppressors of the poor: but they made a vain and wanton use of the wealth unrighteously acquired by their husbands. They made an ostentatious p. 66 show; they walked in pride instead of finding pleasure in the love of God and the service of the poor and needy. There is no touch of weakness in the divine condemnation: “Moreover the Lord saith, because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet—therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts. In that day, the Lord will take away the bravery of”—female attire.
This differed in ancient times from what it is now, but only as one year’s “fashion” differs from another in modern times. There was difference in the names and shapes and materials of the different articles of dress, but there was no difference in the main point: display. Here (verses 18-23) we have an actual list of the articles which would not be recognised by a modern milliner: “tinkling ornaments about their feet, their cauls, their round tires like the moon, the chains and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs and the headbands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles and the wimples, and the crisping pins, the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the vails.”
With these are associated comeliness and perfume. All are now mentioned as objects of the indignation that would kindle on Israel’s glory and extinguish it from the land: “It shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell, there shall be stink: instead of a girdle, a rent: instead of well-set hair, baldness: instead of a stomacher, a girding of sackcloth, and burning instead of beauty.”
If these things had not been used as causes and instruments of pride, they would not have been so objectionable in the divine eyes. God had promised them (“if thou shalt keep the commandments of the Lord thy God and walk in his ways,”) “to make thee plenteous in goods,” and bless them in everything they set their hand to. Doubtless, they would have been more modest in dress if they had been addicted to the commandments of the Lord. Still, their “dressiness” would not have been so offensive. It was only when they were in a rebellious mood that the Lord, in the wilderness, said “Put off thy ornaments from thee” (Ex. xxxiii. 5). Aaron’s p. 67 garments were “for glory and beauty” (Ex. xxviii. 2). The Lord recognises that a maid cannot be expected to forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire (Jer. ii. 32). And as there is force in the question: “Who gave goodly wings to the peacock?” (Job xxxix. 13) so is there force in the consideration that female susceptibility to personal adornment is not a susceptibility of woman’s creating. It is of God, like everything else, and has a place. It is wholly a question of the right circumstances. When God rules in the heart, everything is in place; when He is dethroned, nothing is right. Life itself is unlawful.
In Israel, God was dethroned. They had “cast away the law of the Lord of Hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against his people, and he hath stretched forth his hand against them and hath smitten them” (chapter v. verse 24-25). This is the explanation of the gruesome tirade against all things pleasant to men and women. (Resuming at iii. 25), “Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war. And her (Jerusalem’s) gates shall lament and mourn, and she being desolate, shall sit upon the ground.”
Chapter IV.—Thus continues the theme of chapters ii. and iii. “And in that day (that is, the day of Jerusalem’s downfall), seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread and wear our own apparel; only let us be called by thy name to take away our reproach”—a graphic method of intimating that war would make such havoc, that men would be scarce, and women glad to get husbands on any terms.
This completes the description of the desolation that should overwhelm the house of Jacob as the result of God’s forsaking them—a description which occurs as a long parenthesis in the delineation of the glory appointed for “Judah and Jerusalem” in “the last days.”
Isaiah, son of Amoz, “saw” this “word” concerning them—that salvation and power and honour and glory await them in the finish of things, but that for a long time, God would forsake them, for a “therefore” introduced and explained in chapter ii. 6.—And now (chapter iv. 2) there is a turning back upon the original picture of the last days, as shown at the commencement of the prophecy; and a p. 68 supplying of details in pleasing contrast to the tints of darkness characterising the desolation: “In that day shall the branch of the Lord be beautiful and glorious.” The meaning of this is made certain by the description of restored Israel as, “the branch of my planting, the work of my hands that I may be glorified” (lx. 21). It means that the nation of Israel restored will be “beautiful and glorious.” No nation is such just now. Britain may be thought so, and seems so at a distance, but go close, and see the squalid multitudes, and the broken hearts, and the debased men and women, and the pinched respectabilities, and the barren lives everywhere, and the reigning vanity and vexation of spirit.
Fat and fattening writers, writing in their upholstered seclusions in town or country, or, when they go out, driving in their shining broughams, or travelling in first-class railway carriages, waited on by obsequious porters, may see British civilisation in a roseate hue; but as a whole, it is an ornamented charnel house—not “beautiful and glorious;” but Israel will be “beautiful and glorious” when the “word” is fulfilled that Isaiah, the son of Amoz, “saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.” “And the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for them that are escaped of Israel”—fruit, in the largest sense, otherwise described as “the riches of the Gentiles, and their glory,” in which, saith the Spirit. of God, “ye shall boast yourselves” (Is. lxi. 6). The “abundance of the sea shall be converted (or turned) unto thee, and the forces (or wealth) of the Gentiles shall come unto thee” (lv. 5)—“as a flowing stream” (lxvi. 12). This includes literal fruit of all kinds—everything splendid, everything plentiful, everything at its best “for them that are escaped of Israel” (going back to our verse 2).
“Them that are escaped”—a remnant—natural and spiritual. First the natural: “I will gather her that is driven out and her that I have afflicted, and I will make her that halted, A REMNANT, and her that was cast far off A STRONG NATION.” There have been multitudes of natural Israel (disobedient) who have perished as the leaves of autumn—the whole generation that came out of Egypt and millions since. Multitudes also perish again in the wilderness in the process of restoration (Ezek. xx. 35-38), but a circumcised surviving remnant enter the land, and Zion personified greets them p. 69 with surprise: “The children which thou shalt have after thou hast lost the other will say again in thine ears, the place is too strait for me, give place to me that I may dwell. Then shalt thou say in thine heart: Who hath begotten me these, seeing I have lost my children and am desolate, a captive removing to and fro?” (xlix. 20). Then the spiritual, who will be the rulers—the immortal rulers with Christ their king. Jesus addresses them as the escaped: “that ye may be counted worthy to escape all these things and to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke xxi. 36). Many will not be among the escaped, but will be engulfed in “the judgment and fiery indignation that devour the adversaries” (Heb. x. 27).
For “them that are escaped of Israel,” everything will be good beyond the possibility of exaggeration: and the glory will not be shadowed by the absence of the rejected. Their absence will be part of the glory of the remnant, and it will mean no evil to the absent such as comes with the idea of a hell of torture for the wicked. “They shall not be” (Psa. xxxvii. 10). Where are the 600,000 faithless adults that crossed the Red Sea? They have no existence. They are gone as entirely as if they had never existed. In the language applied in another connection, they are “as though they had not been” (Job x. 19). So it will be with all not included in the remnant escaped of Israel. The dream of them will not disturb the summer morning of Israel’s glory.—Resuming—
“And it shall come to pass that he that is left in Zion and he that remaineth in Jerusalem shall be called holy—even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem.” What time this relates to, and how brought about, is stated in the next verse: “When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof, by the spirit of judgment and by the spirit of burning.” ZECHARIAH adds, “Yea every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto the Lord” (xiv. 21). This will be a great and notable change, both for the Jews and the world. How blessed for Israel when the words spoken by Moses will come to pass: “The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul” (Deut. xxx. 6), and again by Ezekiel, “A new heart will I give you and a new spirit will p. 70 I put within you. And I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh and give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them” (Ezek. xxxvi. 26).
And how blessed for the world when the centre of the authority that rules them with iron hand in all the earth will be a centre of righteousness and holiness: so that a man coming from another land to worship, will not only experience the advantage of change and enjoy the pleasure of beholding a beautiful and well-ordered country, but taste the inexpressible luxury of seeing holiness and purity and kindness in all who stand related to the seat of government. How different from the venal servants and cold officials and corrupt place-holders that one sees at the capitals of European life at the present day. “Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty. . . . Thine eyes shall see Jerusalem (the city of our solemnities) a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken down: not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed. But there the glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams, wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither shall gallant ship pass thereby. . . . And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity” (Isa. xxxiii. 17, 20).
“And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of Mount Zion and upon her assemblies a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night; for upon all the glory shall be a defence. And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the daytime for the heat, and for a place of refuge and a covert from storm and from rain.”
Many are the beautiful thoughts suggested by this description. It is manifestly a description of literal things from the mention of “dwelling places,” and “assemblies,” and “Mount Zion,” and from its analogy to what occurred in connection with the first divine encampment under Moses. When Israel journeyed in the wilderness, “The cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day and fire was on it by night in the sight of all the house of Israel throughout all their journeys” (Ex. xl. 38). This appears to be an indication of the physical accessories of the holy city. By day, it will be under the protection of a visible atmospheric canopy which will temper the heat p. 71 of the sun, and at night this canopy will turn to a fiery radiance, giving light where otherwise darkness would settle on the scene. It will also act as a protection from all elemental disturbances—“a covert from storm and from rain.”
This is a peep at weather in the kingdom. It will not be a perpetual calm, but will be subject in measure to the irregularities of present experience—though not to the same extremes, as shown by the difference between the blessings and the curses of Deut. xxviii. 8, 12, as compared with 23, 24, 38, and 40; and Lev. xxvi. 4-6, compared with 19-20. But even the healthful changes of the weather will not be felt in “the camp of the saints, the beloved city.” No heavy rain showers will ever make things wet and uncomfortable; no storms will whirl dust into corners or shake the palaces with windy gusts. No glaring light will weary the eye by day, but the brilliant radiance of softened sunshine will soothe and charm the senses all day long. At night, there will be no inconvenient darkness, nor the blinding glitter of electric lights, but the soft brightness of diffused flame-light. By day and by night, and at all seasons, the physical conditions of life will be perfect. “Upon all the glory shall be a defence.”
Visitors from the ends of the earth will discover a delightsomeness in the city that is the throne of the Lord that has never been found in the most splendid capitals of the age of sin. It is meet that it should be so. If “glorious things are spoken of thee,” of the city of God, what else could we expect when God’s averted face smiles upon His people in the bestowal of every good thing which the heart can conceive. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive what God hath prepared for them that love him,” but God hath revealed it unto us by His Spirit—“at sundry times and in divers manners,” and certainly nowhere more luminously than in this book of the prophet Isaiah.