Expositor's Bible: The Book of Isaiah Part 6

CHAPTER VII.

_THE MESSIAH._

We have now reached that point of Isaiah's prophesying at which the Messiah becomes the most conspicuous figure on his horizon. Let us take advantage of it, to gather into one statement all that the prophet told his generation concerning that exalted and mysterious Person.[22]

[22] The Messiah, or _Anointed_, is used in the Old Testament of many agents of G.o.d: high-priest (Lev. iv. 3); ministers of the Word (Ps. cv.

15); Cyrus (Isa. xlv. 1); but mostly of G.o.d's king, actual (1 Sam. xxiv.

7), or expected (Dan. ix. 25). So it became in Jewish theology the technical term for the coming King and the Captain of salvation.

When Isaiah began to prophesy, there was current among the people of Judah the expectation of a glorious King. How far the expectation was defined it is impossible to ascertain; but this at least is historically certain. A promise had been made to David (2 Sam. vii. 4-17) by which the permanence of his dynasty was a.s.sured. His offspring, it was said, should succeed him, yet eternity was promised not to any individual descendant, but to the dynasty. Prophets earlier than Isaiah emphasized this establishment of the house of David, even in the days of Israel's greatest distress; but they said nothing of a single monarch with whom the fortunes of the house were to be identified. It is clear, however, even without the evidence of the Messianic Psalms, that the hope of such a hero was quick in Israel. Besides the doc.u.mentary proof of David's own last words (2 Sam. xxiii.), there is the manifest impossibility of dreaming of an ideal kingdom apart from the ideal king. Orientals, and especially Orientals of that period, were incapable of realizing the triumph of an idea or an inst.i.tution without connecting it with a personality. So that we may be perfectly sure, that when Isaiah began to prophesy the people not only counted upon the continuance of David's dynasty, as they counted upon the presence of Jehovah Himself, but were familiar with the ideal of a monarch, and lived in hope of its realization.

In the first stage of his prophecy, it is remarkable, Isaiah makes no use of this tradition, although he gives more than one representation of Israel's future in which it might naturally have appeared. No word is spoken of a Messiah even in the awful conversation, in which Isaiah received from the Eternal the fundamentals of his teaching. The only hope there permitted to him is the survival of a bare, leaderless few of the people, or, to use his own word, _a stump_, with no sign of a prominent sprout upon it. In connection, however, with the survival of a remnant, as we have said on chap. vi. (p. 89), it is plain that there were two indispensable conditions, which the prophet could not help having to state sooner or later. Indeed, one of them he had mentioned already. It was indispensable that the people should have a leader, and that they should have a rallying-point. They must have their King, and they must have their City. Every reader of Isaiah knows that it is on these two themes the prophet rises to the height of his eloquence--Jerusalem shall remain inviolable; a glorious King shall be given unto her. But it has not been so generally remarked, that Isaiah is far more concerned and consistent about the secure city than about the ideal monarch. From first to last the establishment and peace of Jerusalem are never out of his thoughts, but he speaks only now and then of the King to come. Through long periods of his ministry, though frequently describing the blessed future, he is silent about the Messiah, and even sometimes so groups the inhabitants of that future, as to leave no room for Him among them. Indeed, the silences of Isaiah upon this Person are as remarkable as the brilliant pa.s.sages, in which he paints His endowments and His work.

If we consider the moment, chosen by Isaiah for announcing the Messiah and adding his seal to the national belief in the advent of a glorious Son of David, we find some significance in the fact that it was a moment, when the throne of David was unworthily filled and David's dynasty was for the first time seriously threatened. It is impossible to dissociate the birth of a boy called _Immanuel_, and afterwards so closely identified with the fortunes of the whole land (vii. 8), from the public expectation of a King of glory; and critics are almost unanimous in recognizing Immanuel again in the Prince-of-the-Four-Names in chap. ix. Immanuel, therefore, is the Messiah, the promised King of Israel. But Isaiah makes his own first intimation of Him, not when the throne was worthily filled by an Uzziah or a Jotham, but when a fool and traitor to G.o.d abused its power, and the foreign conspiracy to set up a Syrian prince in Jerusalem imperilled the whole dynasty. Perhaps we ought not to overlook the fact, that Isaiah does not here designate Immanuel as a descendant of David. The vagueness with which the mother is described has given rise to a vast amount of speculation as to what particular person the prophet meant by her. But may not Isaiah's vagueness be the only intention he had in mentioning a mother at all?

The whole house of David shared at that moment the sin of the king (vii.

13); and it is not presuming too much upon the freedom of our prophet to suppose, that he shook himself loose from the tradition, which entailed the Messiah upon the royal family of Judah, and at least left it an open question, whether Immanuel might not, in consequence of their sin, spring from some other stock.

It is, however, far less with the origin, than with the experience, of Immanuel that Isaiah is concerned; and those who embark upon curious inquiries, as to who exactly the mother might be, are busying themselves with what the prophet had no interest in, while neglecting that in which really lay the significance of the sign that he offered.

Ahaz by his wilfulness has made a Subst.i.tute necessary. But Isaiah is far more taken up with this: that he has actually mortgaged the prospects of that Subst.i.tute. The Messiah comes, but the wilfulness of Ahaz has rendered His reign impossible. He, whose advent has. .h.i.therto not been foretold except as the beginning of an era of prosperity, and whose person has not been painted but with honour and power, is represented as a helpless and innocent Sufferer--His prospects dissipated by the sins of others, and Himself born only to share His people's indigence (p. 115). Such a representation of the Hero's fate is of the very highest interest. We are accustomed to a.s.sociate the conception of a suffering Messiah only with a much later development of prophecy, when Israel went into exile; but the conception meets us already here. It is another proof that _Esaias is very bold_. He calls his Messiah Immanuel, and yet dares to present Him as nothing but a Sufferer--a Sufferer for the sins of others. Born only to suffer with His people, who should have inherited their throne--that is Isaiah's first doctrine of the Messiah.

Through the rest of the prophecies published during the Syro-Ephraitic troubles the Sufferer is slowly transformed into a Deliverer. The stages of this transformation are obscure. In chap. viii. Immanuel is no more defined than in chap. vii. He is still only a Name of hope upon an unbroken prospect of devastation. _The stretching out of his wings_--_i.e._, the floods of the a.s.syrian--_shall fill the breadth of Thy land, O Immanuel_. But this time that the prophet utters the Name, he feels inspired by new courage. He grasps at Immanuel as the pledge of ultimate salvation. Let the enemies of Judah work their worst; it shall be in vain, _for Immanuel, G.o.d is with us_. And then, to our astonishment, while Isaiah is telling us how he arrived at the convictions embodied in this Name, the personality of Immanuel fades away altogether, and Jehovah of hosts Himself is set forth as the sole sanctuary of those who fear Him. There is indeed a double displacement here. Immanuel dissolves in two directions. As a Refuge, He is displaced by Jehovah; as a Sufferer and a Symbol of the sufferings of the land, by a little community of disciples, the first embodiment of the Church, who now, with Isaiah, can do nothing except wait for the Lord (pp. 124-126).

Then, when the prophet's yearning thoughts, that will not rest upon so dark a closure, struggle once more, and struggling pa.s.s from despair to pity, and from pity to hope, and from hope to triumph in a salvation actually achieved, they hail all at once as the Hero of it the Son whose birth was promised. With an emphasis, which vividly reveals the sense of exhaustion in the living generation and the conviction that only something fresh, and sent straight from G.o.d Himself, can now avail Israel, the prophet cries: _Unto us a Child is born; unto us a Son is given_. The Messiah appears in a glory that floods His origin out of sight. We cannot see whether He springs from the house of David; but _the government is to be upon His shoulder_, and He shall reign _on David's throne with righteousness for ever_. His t.i.tle shall be fourfold: _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _G.o.d-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_, _Prince-of-Peace_.

These Four Names do certainly not invite us to grudge them meaning, and they have been claimed as incontrovertible proofs, that the prophet had an absolutely Divine Person in view. Some distinguished scholars insist that the promised Deliverer is nothing less than a G.o.d in the metaphysical sense of the word.[23] There are serious reasons, however, which make us doubt this conclusion, and, though we firmly hold that Jesus Christ was G.o.d, prevent us from recognizing these names as prophecies of His Divinity. Two of the names are capable of being used of an earthly monarch: _Wonderful-Counsellor_ and _Prince-of-Peace_, which are, within the range of human virtue, in evident contrast to Ahaz, at once foolish in the conception of his policy and warlike in its results. It will be more difficult to get Western minds to see how _Father-Everlasting_ may be applied to a mere man, but the ascription of eternity is not unusual in Oriental t.i.tles, and in the Old Testament is sometimes rendered to things that perish. When Hebrews speak of any one as everlasting, that does not necessarily imply Divinity. The second name, which we render _G.o.d-Hero_, is, it is true, used of Jehovah Himself in the very next chapter to this, but in the plural it is also used of men by Ezekiel (x.x.xii. 21). The part of it translated _G.o.d_ is a frequent name of the Divine Being in the Old Testament, but literally means only _mighty_, and is by Ezekiel (x.x.xi. 11) applied to Nebuchadnezzar. We should hesitate, therefore, to understand by these names "a G.o.d in the metaphysical sense of the word."

[23] I regret very much that in previous editions I should have erroneously imputed this opinion to Dr. Hermann Schultz--through a mistranslation of his words on pp. 726, 727 of his _A. T. Theologie_.

We fall back with greater confidence on other arguments of a more general kind, which apply to all Isaiah's prophecies of the Messiah. If Isaiah had one revelation rather than another to make, it was the revelation of the unity of G.o.d. Against king and people, who crowded their temple with the shrines of many deities, Isaiah presented Jehovah as the one only G.o.d. It would simply have nullified the force of his message, and confused the generation to which he brought it, if either he or they had conceived of the Messiah, with the conceiving of Christian theology, as a separate Divine personality.

Again, as Mr. Robertson Smith has very clearly explained,[24] the functions a.s.signed by Isaiah to the King of the future are simply the ordinary duties of the monarchy, for which He is equipped by the indwelling of that Spirit of G.o.d, that makes all wise men wise and valorous men valorous. "We believe in a Divine and eternal Saviour, because the work of salvation as we understand it in the light of the New Testament is essentially different from the work of the wisest and best earthly king." But such an earthly king's work is all Isaiah looks for. So that, so far from its being derogatory to Christ to grudge the sense of Divinity to these names, it is a fact that the more spiritual our notions are of the saving work of Jesus, the less inclined shall we be to claim the prophecies of Isaiah in proof of His Deity.

[24] _Prophets of Israel_, p. 306.

There is a third argument in the same direction, the force of which we appreciate only when we come to discover how very little from this point onwards Isaiah had to say about the promised king. In chaps. i.-x.x.xix.

only three other pa.s.sages are interpreted as describing the Messiah. The first of these, xi. 1-5, dating perhaps from about 720, when Hezekiah was king, tells us, for the first and only time by Isaiah's lips, that the Messiah is to be a scion of David's house, and confirms what we have said: that His duties, however perfectly they were to be discharged, were the usual duties of Judah's monarchy.[25] The second pa.s.sage, x.x.xii. 1 ff., which dates probably from after 705, when Hezekiah was still king, is, if indeed it refers at all to the Messiah, a still fainter, though sweeter, echo of previous descriptions. While the third pa.s.sage, x.x.xiii. 17: _Thou shalt see thy king in his beauty_, does not refer to the Messiah at all, but to Hezekiah, then prostrate and in sackcloth, with a.s.syria thundering at the gate of Jerusalem (701). The ma.s.s of Isaiah's predictions of the Messiah thus fall within the reign of Ahaz, and just at the point at which Ahaz proved an unworthy representative of Jehovah, and Judah and Israel were threatened with complete devastation. There is a repet.i.tion when Hezekiah has come to the throne. But in the remaining seventeen years, except perhaps for one allusion, Isaiah is silent on the ideal king, although he continued throughout that time to unfold pictures of the blessed future which contained every other Messianic feature, and the realization of which he placed where he had placed his Prince-of-the-Four-Names--in connection, that is, with the approaching defeat of the a.s.syrians. Ignoring the Messiah, during these years Isaiah lays all the stress of his prophecy on the inviolability of Jerusalem; and while he promises the recovery of the actually reigning monarch from the distress of the a.s.syrian invasion,--as if that were what the people chiefly desired to see, and not a brighter, stronger subst.i.tute,--he hails Jehovah Himself, in solitary and undeputed sovereignty, as Judge, Lawgiver, Monarch and Saviour (x.x.xiii. 22). Between Hezekiah, thus restored to his beauty, and Jehovah's own presence, there is surely no room left for another royal personage. But these very facts--that Isaiah felt most compelled to predict an ideal king when the actual king was unworthy, and that, on the contrary, when the reigning king proved worthy, approximating to the ideal, Isaiah felt no need for another, and indeed in his prophecies left no room for another--form surely a powerful proof that the king he expected was not a supernatural being, but a human personality, extraordinarily endowed by G.o.d, one of the descendants of David by ordinary succession, but fulfilling the ideal which his forerunners had missed. Even if we allow that the four names contain among them the predicate of Divinity, we must not overlook the fact that the Prince is only called by them. It is not that _He is_, but that He shall be called, _Wonderful-Counsellor_, _G.o.d-Hero_, _Father-Everlasting_, _Prince-of-Peace_. Nowhere is there a dogmatic statement that He is Divine. Besides, it is inconceivable that if Isaiah, the prophet of the unity of G.o.d, had at any time a second Divine Person in his hope, he should have afterwards remained so silent about Him. To interpret the ascription of the Four Names as a conscious definition of Divinity, at all like the Christian conception of Jesus Christ, is to render the silence of Isaiah's later life and the silence of subsequent prophets utterly inexplicable.

[25] See further on this pa.s.sage pp. 180-183. As is there pointed out, while these pa.s.sages on the Messiah are indeed infrequent and unconnected, there is a very evident progress through them of Isaiah's conception of his Hero's character.

On these grounds, then, we decline to believe that Isaiah saw in the king of the future "a G.o.d in the metaphysical sense of the word." Just because we know the proofs of the Divinity of Jesus to be so spiritual, do we feel the uselessness of looking for them to prophecies, that manifestly describe purely earthly and civil functions.

But such a conclusion by no means shuts us out from tracing a relation between these prophecies and the appearance of Jesus. The fact, that Isaiah allowed them to go down to posterity, proves that he himself did not count them to have been exhausted in Hezekiah. And this fact of their preservation is ever so much the more significant, that their literal truth was discredited by events. Isaiah had evidently foretold the birth and bitter youth of Immanuel for the _near_ future. Immanuel's childhood was to begin with the devastation of Ephraim and Syria, and to be pa.s.sed in circ.u.mstances consequent on the devastation of Judah, which was to follow close upon that of her two enemies. But although Ephraim and Syria were immediately spoiled, as Isaiah foresaw, Judah lay in peace all the reign of Ahaz and many years after his death. So that had Immanuel been born in the next twenty-five years after the announcement of His birth, He would not have found in His own land the circ.u.mstances which Isaiah foretold as the discipline of His boyhood. Isaiah's forecast of Judah's fate was, therefore, falsified by events. That the prophet or his disciples should have allowed it to remain, is proof that they believed it to have contents, which the history they had lived through neither exhausted nor discredited. In the prophecies of the Messiah there was something ideal, which was as permanent and valid for the future as the prophecy of the Remnant or that of the visible majesty of Jehovah. If the attachment, at which the prophet aimed when he launched these prophecies on the stream of time, was denied them by their own age, that did not mean their submersion, but only their freedom to float further down the future and seek attachment there.

This boldness, to entrust to future ages a prophecy discredited by contemporary history, argues a profound belief in its moral meaning and eternal significance; and it is this boldness, in face of disappointment continued from generation to generation in Israel, that const.i.tutes the uniqueness of the Messianic hope among that people. To sublimate this permanent meaning of the prophecies from the contemporary material, with which it is mixed, is not difficult. Isaiah foretells his Prince on the supposition that certain things are fulfilled. When the people are reduced to the last extreme, when there is no more a king to rally or to rule them, when the land is in captivity, when revelation is closed, when, in despair of the darkness of the Lord's face, men have taken to them that have familiar spirits and wizards that peep and mutter, then, in that last sinful, hopeless estate of man, a Deliverer shall appear.

_The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform it._ This is the first article of Isaiah's Messianic creed, and stands back behind the Messiah and all Messianic blessings, their exhaustless origin. Whatsoever man's sin and darkness be, the Almighty lives, and His zeal is infinite.

Therefore it is a fact eternally true, that whatsoever Deliverer His people need and can receive shall be sent to them, and shall be styled by whatsoever names their hearts can best appreciate. t.i.tles shall be given Him to attract their hope and their homage, and not a definition of His nature, of which their theological vocabulary would be incapable.

This is the vital kernel of Messianic prophecy in Isaiah. The _zeal of the Lord_, kindling the dark thoughts of the prophet as he broods over his people's need of salvation, suddenly makes a Saviour visible--visible just as He is needed there and then. Isaiah hears Him hailed by t.i.tles that satisfy the particular wants of the age, and express men's thoughts as far up the idea of salvation and majesty as they of that age can rise. But the prophet has also perceived that sin and disaster will so acc.u.mulate before the Messiah comes, that, though innocent, He shall have to bear tribulation and pa.s.s to His prime through suffering. No one with open mind can deny, that in this moderate estimate of the prophet's meaning there is a very great deal of the essence of the Gospel as it has been fulfilled in the personal consciousness and saving work of Jesus Christ,--as much of that essence, indeed, as it was possible to communicate to so early a generation, and one whose religious needs were so largely what we call temporal. But if we grant this, and if at the same time we appreciate the uniqueness of such a hope as this of Israel, then surely it must be allowed to have the appearance of a special preparation for Christ's life and work; and so, to use very moderate words which have been applied to Messianic prophecy in general, it may be taken "as a proof of its true connection with the Gospel dispensation as part of one grand scheme in the counsels of Providence."[26]

[26] Stanton: _The Jewish and Christian Messiah_.

Men do not ask when they drink of a streamlet high up on the hills, "Is this going to be a great river?" They are satisfied if it is water enough to quench their thirst. And so it was enough for Old Testament believers if they found in Isaiah's prophecy of a Deliverer--as they did find--what satisfied their own religious needs, without convincing them to what volumes it should swell. But this does not mean that in using these Old Testament prophecies we Christians should limit our enjoyment of them to the measure of the generation to whom they were addressed. To have known Christ must make the predictions of the Messiah different to a man. You cannot bring so infinite an ocean of blessing into historic connection with these generous, expansive intimations of the Old Testament without its pa.s.sing into them. If we may use a rough figure, the Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament are tidal rivers. They not only run, as we have seen, to their sea, which is Christ; they feel His reflex influence. It is not enough for a Christian to have followed the historical direction of the prophecies, or to have proved their connection with the New Testament as parts of one Divine harmony. Forced back by the fulness of meaning to which he has found their courses open, he returns to find the savour of the New Testament upon them, and that where he descended shallow and tortuous channels, with all the difficulties of historical exploration, he is borne back on full tides of wors.h.i.+p. To use the appropriate words of Isaiah, _the Lord is with him there, a place of broad rivers and streams_.

With all this, however, we must not forget that, beside these prophecies of a great earthly ruler, there runs another stream of desire and promise, in which we see a much stronger premonition of the fact that a Divine Being shall some day dwell among men. We mean the Scriptures in which it is foretold that Jehovah Himself shall visibly visit Jerusalem.

This line of prophecy, taken along with the powerful anthropomorphic representations of G.o.d,--astonis.h.i.+ng in a people like the Jews, who so abhorred the making of an image of the Deity upon the likeness of anything in heaven and earth,--we hold to be the proper Old Testament instinct that the Divine should take human form and tabernacle amongst men. But this side of our subject--the relation of the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament to the Incarnation--we postpone till we come to the second part of the book of Isaiah, in which the anthropomorphic figures are more frequent and daring than they are here.

BOOK II.

_PROPHECIES FROM THE ACCESSION OF HEZEKIAH TO THE DEATH OF SARGON, 727-705_ B.C.

ISAIAH:--

xxviii. 725 B.C.

x. 5-34. 721 B.C.

xi., xii. About 720 B.C.?

xx. 711 B.C.

xxi. 1-10. 710 B.C.

x.x.xviii., x.x.xix. Between 712 and 705 B.C.

BOOK II.

The prophecies with which we have been engaged (chaps. ii.-x. 4) fall either before or during the great a.s.syrian invasion of Syria, undertaken in 734-732 by Tiglath-pileser II., at the invitation of King Ahaz.

n.o.body has any doubt about that. But when we ask what prophecies of Isaiah come next in chronological order, we raise a storm of answers. We are no longer on the sure ground we have been enjoying.

Under the canonical arrangement the next prophecy is "The Woe upon the a.s.syrian" (x. 5-34). In the course of this the a.s.syrian is made to boast of having overthrown Samaria (vv. 9-11): _Is not Samaria as Damascus?...

Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?_ If _Samaria_ mean the capital city of Northern Israel--and the name is never used in these parts of Scripture for anything else--and if the prophet be quoting a boast which the a.s.syrian was actually in a position to make, and not merely imagining a boast, which he would be likely to make some years afterwards (an entirely improbable view, though held by one great scholar[27]), then an event is here described as past and over which did not happen during Tiglath-pileser's campaign, nor indeed till twelve years after it.

Tiglath-pileser did not require to besiege Samaria in the campaign of 734-732. The king, Pekah, was slain by a conspiracy of his own subjects; and Hoshea, the ringleader, who succeeded, willingly purchased the stability of a usurped throne by homage and tribute to the king of kings. So Tiglath-pileser went home again, satisfied to have punished Israel by carrying away with him the population of Galilee. During his reign there was no further appearance of the a.s.syrians in Palestine, but at his death in 727 Hoshea, after the fas.h.i.+on of a.s.syrian va.s.sals when the throne at Nineveh changed occupants, attempted to throw off the yoke of the new king, Salmana.s.sar IV. Along with the Phnician and Philistine cities, Hoshea negotiated an alliance with So, or Seve, the Ethiopian, a usurper who had just succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng his supremacy over the land of the Pharaohs. In a year Salmana.s.sar marched south upon the rebels. He took Hoshea prisoner on the borders of his territory (725), but, not content, as his predecessor had been, with the submission of the king, _he came up throughout all the land, and went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years_.[28] He did not live to see the end of the siege, and Samaria was taken in 722 by Sargon, his successor.