Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against His people
The prophecy explained
Jehovah is about to bring foreign armies as the instruments of His judgment; the vision of the worst of human calamities--the invasion of a rich, civilised, luxurious nation by overwhelming hordes of barbarians--rises before the prophet: he speaks of them as present, and his words have a terrible force to him who reads them now, while he thinks of their fearful import then.
Jehovah has set up a standard to which He is gathering the nations under the Assyrian rule, and the prophet sees them steadily though swiftly coming on in war-like array--bowmen, horses and chariots: they rush to battle with the roar of lions, they seize and hold down their prisoners and their booty with the growl which marks the lion’s refusal to give up his prey; they come on like the sea in its rage; and when the helpless in, habitant of Judah turns from this rising tide to the land--his own land--he sees only the darkness of woe; and when he turns again from the earth to look upward he sees only the thick clouds gathering over the heavens above him. (Sir E. Strachey, Bart.)
Prophecy perpetually fulfilled
This is such a picture of “the life of things” that it is equally the description of the same judgment of God in whatever age or to whatever nation occurring. In successive ages it told the Jew of the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Greek and the Roman; to the subject of the Roman Empire it spoke no less clearly of the Goth and the Vandal; the British monk must have recalled it in the days when Gildas learnt its truth from the Dane and the Norman and the Spaniard from the Mohammedan; the Byzantine from Timour “the incarnate wrath of God”; the continental nations from the revolutionary armies and Napoleon; and, in our own day, the people of France from the Germans. (Sir E. Strachey, Bart.)
God’s anger and its manifestation
I. IN GOD’S INFINITE NATURE THERE IS THE QUALITY OF ANGER. It is not a stormy passion, like wrath in sinful man, but the settled, intense, burning antagonism to moral evil which must necessarily exist in one who is infinitely perfect. The man who most nearly resembles God will be “angry and sin not?”
II. GOD’S ANGER MAY BE KINDLED BY THE SPIRIT AND CONDUCT OF HIS PEOPLE. “Therefore is the anger of the Lord kindled against His people.” Guilt is in proportion to the light and privilege abused.
III. GOD’S ANGER MAY MANIFEST ITSELF IN ACTUAL AND FEARFUL PUNISHMENT. It is an active antagonism to moral evil. “He hath stretched forth His hand against them,” etc. The hand of God is the symbol of His mighty power. “It is a fearful thing to fall,” etc. (H. M. Booth.)
Hills trembling
(Isa_5:25):--The words seem to allude to the tremor occasioned by the stroke of the workman’s hammer upon some hard body. (R. Macculloch.)
Horses’ hoofs as flint
(Isa_5:28):--Therefore he will not shrink from riding them on the rocky soil of Palestine, which was extremely unfavourable to the use of horses (Amo_6:12). Similar allusions are frequent in ancient literature, the shoeing of horses being unknown in antiquity. (Prof. J. Skinner, D. D.)
A darkened heaven
(Isa_5:30):--It is our wisdom, by keeping a good conscience, to keep all clear between us and heaven, that we may have light from above, when clouds and darkness are round about us. (M. Henry.)
