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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 396. The Life of Isaiah
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Isaiah is very bold.- Rom_10:20.
It was a crisis in the history of Israel that needed an exceptional messenger. The last half of the eighth century was to witness the fall of the Northern Kingdom. It was hopelessly corrupt. Amos and Hosea had pronounced its doom. The judgment was inevitable. Its ministers were close at hand. Would Jerusalem share the fate of Samaria? How could it escape in the impending conflict between Assyria and Egypt for the supremacy of Western Asia? Lying as it did close to the route which the hostile armies must traverse, its existence was at stake. So human reason would have calculated. But Jehovah's purpose was to preserve His own city; and as the interpreter of that purpose He raised up the prophet Isaiah.
2. The messenger was worthy of the occasion. “Of the other prophets,” writes Ewald, “all the more celebrated ones were distinguished by some special excellence and peculiar power, whether of speech or of deed; in Isaiah all the powers and all the beauties of prophetic speech and deed combine to form a symmetrical whole; he is distinguished less by any special excellence than by the symmetry and the perfection of all his powers. There are rarely combined in the same mind the profoundest prophetic emotion and purest feeling, the most unwearied, successful, and consistent activity amid all the confusions and changes of life, and lastly, true poetic ease and beauty of style, combined with force and irresistible power; yet this triad of powers we find realized in Isaiah as in no other prophet.” He is indeed the king among the prophets. During his long ministry of forty years, through evil report and good report, unflinchingly and consistently he delivered Jehovah's message to a people blind to its high calling, deaf to the Divine word, destitute of energizing faith and elevating hope. When they were secure in the conceit of their own arrogant self-confidence, he warned them of the impending judgment. When they trembled in pusillanimous despair at approaching calamity, he encouraged them with the assurance of Divine protection. With unshaken confidence he proclaimed the absolute sovereignty of Jehovah over the nations of the world, and maintained “the eternal hope of the Divine Kingdom upon earth.”
3. It has been said of Isaiah that he died with the gospel on his lips. Nowhere can we find the promise of the Messiah more clearly announced; nowhere is the kingdom of the Messiah depicted in colours more lifelike and abiding. The prophetic vision of Isaiah is not restricted by the narrow limits of his age and country; he sees the Church of Christ rising before him and uniting in one the Jew and the Gentile. The day should come, he declared, when Egypt and Assyria, the representatives of the unbelieving powers of the world, should join with Israel in adoring the one true God, when the Lord of Hosts should say of them, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands.” The prophecies of Isaiah form, as it were, a bridge between the Old Covenant and the New.
But there are other respects besides this in which Isaiah occupies a foremost place among the Hebrew prophets. The old times were passing away, when the prophet appealed to the eye rather than to the ear and the mind. The symbolical actions through which the will of God was made known to His people gave place to solemn warnings, or promises of forgiveness. It is true that the glowing words of the prophet might still at times be accompanied by some visible action, as when Isaiah “walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia”; but such visible actions were accompaniments only, and tended to disappear altogether. The prophet became in very truth a prophêtês or “announcer” of the will of God to man. The miracles by which an Elijah or an Elisha had attested their power and the truth of their mission made way for the more spiritual testimony of prophecy itself. The range of the prophet's vision was no longer confined to his own nation and people; the message he delivered was addressed to other nations as well. In Isaiah, therefore, we see prophecy increasing in evangelical clearness, in spirituality, and in catholicity. It embraces all men, not the chosen people only, and promises to Jew and Gentile alike the blessings of the Messianic Kingdom.