And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not
Isaiah: his heaviness and his consolation
1.
Isaiah summed up his whole future life in those two words, “Behold me; send me.” Then on his ardent soul was poured the heavy message, “Go, and thou shalt tell this people” (God speaks of them no more as His own), “Hear ye on, and understand not; and see ye on, and know not. Make thou dull the heart of this people, and its ears make thou heavy, and its eyes close thou; lest it see with its eyes, and with its ears hearken, and its heart understand, and it return and one heal it.” Startling office for one so sanguine and so young! Heavy burden to bear for probably sixty-one years of life, to be closed by a martyr’s excruciating death! Outside of that commission there was hope: hope, because the promises of God could not fail of fulfilment: hope, because in the worst times of Israel there had been those seven thousand which the prophet knew not of, but whose number God revealed to him, who had stood faithful to God amid the national apostasy; hope, because when God pronounces not a doom, we may take refuge in the loving mercy of Him who swears by Himself, “As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure individuals: the people, not to individuals, only as they were such as the mass of the nation was, as they themselves made up that mass. This, in all seeming, was the thankless office to which Isaiah was called, to be heard, to be listened to, by some with contempt, by others with seeming respect, and to leave things in the main worse than he found them.
3. Isaiah’s office was towards those, in part at least, who were ever hearing, never doing, and so never understanding. And so (so to speak) he was only to make things worse. So St. Paul says, “The earth which drinketh in the rain which cometh oft upon it--if it bring forth thorns and briars, is accounted worthless and nigh unto cursing,” not yet accursed, yet nigh unto it, “whose end”--if it remains such unto the end--“is to be burned.” There were better among the people; there were worse; but such was the general character; it was an ever-hearing,--hearing,--hearing (such is the force of the words, “hear ye hearing on,” evermore), never wearied of hearing, yet never doing; ever seeing, as they thought, yet never gaining insight; and so becoming ever duller, their sight ever more and more bleared, until to hear and to see would become well-nigh, and to man, impossible. The more they heard and saw, the further they were from understanding, from being converted, from the reach of healing. Such they were, a little later, in Ezekiel’s time. So it was when He came of whom Isaiah prophesied. They thought that they knew the law, but only to allege their interpretation of it against Him. The more they heard, the more they were blinded. And their imagined seeing and their real blindness, was their condemnation (Joh_9:41). This is inseparable from every revelation of God, from every preaching of the Gospel, from every speaking of God inwardly to the soul, from every motion of God the Holy Ghost, from every drawing or forbidding of that, judge which He has placed within, our conscience, from every hearing of God’s Word. All and each leave the soul in a better condition or a worse. Not by any direct hardening from God, not through any agency of the prophet, but by man’s free will, hearing but not obeying, seeing but not doing, feeling but resisting, the preaching of the prophet would leave them only more hopelessly far from that conversion, whereby God might heal them.
4. And what said the prophet? Contrary as the sentence must have been to all the yearnings of his soul, crushing to his hopes, he knew that it must be just, because “the Judge of the whole world” must “do right.” He intercedes, but only by those three words, “Lord, how long?” He appeals to God. Such could not be God’s ultimate purpose with His people. The night was to come; sin deserved it; but was it to have no dawn? Hope there is yet, but meanwhile a still-deepening night, a climax of woe; and that in two stages. In the first, “cities left without inhabitants”; and not cities only, as a whole, but “houses” too “tenantless”; nor these alone, but “the whole land desolate, and God removes the inhabitants far away, and there shall be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.” Nor this only, but when, in this sifting time, nine parts should be gone, and one-tenth only remain, this should be again consumed: only, like those trees which survived the winters and storms of a thousand years, while the glory, wherewith God once clad it, was gone, its hewn stem was still to live; “a holy seed” was to be the stock thereof. The vision, opened before him, stretches on until now and to the end. His question, “How long? Until when?” implied a hope that there would be an end; the answer “until,” declared that there would be an end. We have, in one, that first carrying away, the small remnant which should return; its new desolation; the holy seed which should survive; the restoration at the end, of which St. Paul says, then “all Israel shall be saved.”
5. And this message fell on one of the tenderest of hearts in its early freshness. As he is eminently the Gospel-prophet, the evangelist in the old covenant, so he had already been taught by the Holy Ghost the Gospel lesson, “Love your enemies.” He denounces God’s judgments; but he himself is the type of Him who wept over Jerusalem.
6. Yet where there is desolation for the sake of God, there is also consolation. Wherein was Isaiah’s? Not in the solace of his married life. His daily dress was like John Baptist’s, the hair cloth pressing upon his loins, wearing to the naked flesh, although mentioned only when he was to put it off and himself to become a portent to his people, walking naked and barefoot (Isa_20:2). His two sons were, by their names, the continual pictures of that woe on his people. What, then, was his solace? Isaiah had seen, as man can see, Christ’s Deity (Joh_12:41). He had seen Him, the brightness of the Father’s glory and the express image of His person. Yet he had not seen the Son alone. He himself says, “Mine eyes have seen the King,” Him who is the Lord of hosts. And the Holy Ghost says by St. Paul that He spake by Isaiah in these words (Act_28:25-27). It was a human Form which he beheld, sitting enthroned as the Judge, and receiving the worship of the glowing love of the seraphim. How should not this vision live in him for those threescore years? So God prepared him to be, above all “the goodly company of the prophets,” the evangelic prophet, in that he had seen the glory of the Lord. He, too, was a man of longing. His darkest visions are the dawn streaks of the brightest light. He lived in a future for himself, a future which God had promised to the remnant of His people He looked on beyond this world of disappointment and shadows. God Himself is the everlasting bliss of those who wait for Him.
7. Be not dismayed, then, though men who think that they see, see not, or though they see not, because they think that they see. It is but the condition of the victories of faith over the soul, free, if it will, to disbelieve. Be not discouraged, if iniquity abound, or mankind seem to deafen itself in its pleasures or gains, or at the stupidity of an intellect which will not acknowledge a God whom it does not see, or own its own free will, which it has used against God continually, and, by repeated choices of its own evil against God’s good, has well-nigh enslaved to its master passion, which God would have subjected to it. Jesus foretold at once His victories and His sorrows; His victories in those who willed to look to Him as their Master, their Saviour, their Regenerator, their Life, their Resurrection, their Immortality of joy; His sorrows, in those who would not be redeemed. (E. B. Pusey, D. D.)
The prophet’s thoughts at this period
The prophet’s thoughts at this period are few, if great. They are in the main these three:
1. His though of the Lord, the King.
2. His thought of the people in their insensibility to the majesty and rule of the King.
3. These two thoughts when brought together inevitably create the third--that of the annihilation of the people down to a remnant, that the Lord may be exalted in that day. (A. B. Davidson, D. D.)
The importance of understanding truth
The vast importance of people’s understanding what they hear, our blessed Saviour frequently inculcated upon those who attended His ministry. He often introduced His subject by calling upon them to hear and understand: after discoursing to them He sometimes asked if they understood what they heard? He blamed them if they did not understated, and commended those who were so happy as to know the things which were freely given them of God. (R. Macculloch.)
Israel’s punishment necessary
We, reading this prophecy in the light of history, can say that if it were anywhere necessary thus to assert God’s righteousness against sin, most especially was it so in this the chosen nation of Israel. Israel had been set apart that in him all the nations of the earth should be blessed; and if he became reprobate, where were this promise to the world? “If gold rusteth, what should iron do?” Therefore the cities were to be wasted without inhabitant, and the land utterly desolate; and even after a partial recovery from this punishment, and a humble restoration of a small part of their ancient glory, the stern process should be repeated again and again: the invasion of Pekah and Rezin would be repaired only to be followed by that of Sennacherib; the captivity of Manasseh would succeed the peaceful reign of Hezekiah; Josiah would restore the kingdom only to be laid waste by the Egyptian and the Assyrian; the Roman would come after the Greek, and even Hadrian after Titus, All thought of an earthly glory of the nation must give way before such a, prospect. If the prophet could have looked so far forward, and with a patriot’s hopes alone, there was nothing but humiliation and despair before him; he could, at most, expect but such temporary alleviation and restoration as might enable him to do his work while he was there. (Sir E. Strachey, Bart.)
The meaning of the message intrusted to Isaiah
Did it represent the ministry to which he was solemnly deputed as a forlorn hope, because, from the moral temper and confirmed habits of the people, an unfavourable result was antecedently certain? This seems the sense in which it was understood by the authors of the LXX, and its form, if Hebrew idiom be taken into account, is by no means inconsistent with this meaning. It is a mode of expression, very characteristic of Hebrew thought, to represent the result of a course of action as designed which is only foreseen or confidently anticipated. Familiar with forms of government in which the sovereign power appeared wholly without control, the Hebrews transferred ideas derived from this source to the government of God. They had a conviction that the Judge of all the earth must do right, but the conception of the rights of the creature and correlative responsibilities of the Creator did not lie within the horizon of their thought. Their overwhelming sense of the Divine power, absolutely ordering all events and giving no account of its dealings, permitted them to say, without any idea that they were imputing evil to God, “Why hast Thou made us to err from Thy ways, and hardened our heart from Thy fear?” (E. W. Shalders.)
The message from God
It may be said that in the passage under consideration the utterance is not the prophet’s, but God’s. But this makes no difference, since Isaiah’s mind was the field of revelation; and, strictly speaking, there is no more difficulty in the idea of God’s accommodating Himself to modes of human thought than in His employing our modes of speech. It is a necessity limiting the absolute truth of revelation. If men’s minds are to be reached, the Spirit must use such avenues of approach as have been thrown up for other occasions. God’s communications to Isaiah would be tinctured by Isaiah’s habits of thought as inevitably as the prophet’s publication of them. (E. W. Shalders.)
Incidental penalty
A college professor would not be doing his duty towards his conscientious and diligent students if he forbore to proceed to the higher branches of the subject of his prelections, because his teaching would have the inevitable effect of confusing and discouraging the idle men who had failed to master his elementary course. So it is the appointment of Isaiah’s mission, notwithstanding its foreseen failure in the case of all but a remnant of the nation, which gives it a judicial character, and makes it a menace of judgment. (E. W. Shalders.)
Judgment and mercy
Hence our Lord’s use of the passage to justify His having recourse to parables while prosecuting His ministry in the midst of a nation that had already shown a strong disposition to reject Him. He puts His teaching into a form in which it could be apprehended by such as were willing to do the will of His Father, but which would hide it from those whose disobedience to known truth had deprived them of spiritual insight. This was a chastisement upon their perverse and prejudiced minds, because a virtual withdrawal of His saving ministry from them. It was like closing their day of visitation. Yet in another aspect the adoption of this course was an act of mercy; for teaching, the meaning of which is obscure to the unwilling hearer, is less hardening than plain truth, because it does not provoke such obstinate resistance. So also there was mercy in Isaiah’s ministry to his hardened fellow countrymen. It was to be continued until their cities were desolate, without inhabitant, and the Lord had removed men far away. Then its gracious purpose to them would become manifest, for when suffering Divine judgments they would be thrown back upon neglected warnings. Though so long unavailing, as unavailing as if their very design had been to confirm them in their disobedience, these warnings would eventually become weird fingers pointing to the cause of their sufferings, and indicating the way of salvation through repentance and turning to God (verses 11-13). For the severest lines of the prophet’s message plainly imply that, even after a course of obstinate impenitence, to turn to put a constraint upon God’s mercy, and draw forth His forgiveness: “lest,” He says, “they convert and be healed.” (E. W. Shalders.)
A loud call to repentance
Four the prophet to represent God as actually no longer inviting men to repent, but only desiring their greater condemnation, was a new and most forcible call to repentance for men who had rejected many previous calls. It was like digging a grave for a man in his own sight, after you have failed to convince him by word that his course of conduct must end in death. It brought the far-off results of men’s behaviour most vividly before their eyes. It roused them to thought by the unwonted cry that the hour of repentance was past. (P. Thomson, M. A.)
God vindicating Himself
It is most important, when a boy at school is careless, and makes little or no progress in learning, that his teacher should put himself in a right position--that he should be able to declare that he paid attention to him, and did his utmost to promote his education. It is most important, when a son turns out badly, that the parents should put themselves in a right position--that they should be able to declare that they did their duty by him. In like manner, it was most important that, relative to the people of Judah, God should put Himself in a right position, or in a position to appeal to facts; that He should be able even to appeal to themselves, as to whether He had not interested Him self in them, borne patiently with them, and wrought with them in every possible way to guide their feet into right paths. But if Isaiah had not been sent to them, would God have been in a position to appeal to facts? He would not. It is not strange, then, that he was commissioned to go to them in the character of a prophet, and deal with them in order to their reformation. (G. Cron, M. A.)
Opposite effects from the same agencies
The same fire reddens the gold and burns the dross. Under the same threshing sledge the grain is cleansed and the chaff crushed out. By the same press beam the oil is separated from the dregs. The same sunshine and rain which cause the living tree to grow and flourish, are the most potent influences to bring the dead tree to decay. (Sunday School Chronicle.)
A hard ministry
“On the morning before I was licensed,” says the late Rev. John Brown, “that text was much impressed on my spirit.” He said, Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not, etc. Since I was ordained at Haddington, I know not how often it hath been heavy to my heart to think how much this Scripture hath been fulfilled in my ministry. Frequently I have had an anxious desire to be removed by death, from being a plague to my poor congregation. Often, however, I have checked myself, and have considered this wish as my folly, and begged of the Lord, that if it were not for His glory to remove me by death, He would make me successful in my work.”
See ye indeed, but perceive not
Sight without insight
(with Mar_8:18):--They had sight, but no insight. They exercised the power of observation, but had no imagination. They were ritualistic, but not poetic. In their company could be found scribes, but no prophets. They had many politicians, but no statesmen. Eyes had they, but no vision. Life to these people was a superficies, not a profundity. Facts were planes, not cubes. Everything was a surface phenomenon, a mere skin with no wondrous internal ministry to arouse the imagination and to fill the being with awe. Now the suggestion of the Scriptures is this: Life is cubical, every fact being a cube. To see only the surface is elementary and primitive. The crown of life consists in being able to comprehend with all saints what is the length, and breadth, and depth, and height, of every fact which we encounter in the common paths of daily life. The practical which we can measure with a foot rule has mystical relationships; the material has spiritual significance. To see the larger relationships of things, to discern their spiritual pose and set, to peer into their possible issues, is vision. “Thousands of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.” (J. H.Jowett, M. A.)
Two ways of looking at things: the superficial and the cubical
Let me illustrate a little more clearly these two ways o flocking at things, the superficial and the cubical; the so-called practical and the imaginative; the way of sight and the way of vision.
1. There are two ways of looking at a little child. “Sight” exercises the power of observation and beholds a little animal, compounded of material atoms in varying quality, a cunning product of material forces; a little bundle of hungers and thirsts. “Insight” beholds in the child a germ of wondrous possibility, a promise of the eternal, a vehicle of unnamed endowments, a possible image of Christ.
2. There are two ways of looking at a flower. There is the way of “sight”--
A primrose by the river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
And there is the way of “insight”--
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the cranny.
I hold you here root and all, in my hand,
Little flower, but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
3. There are two ways of looking at a book: “sight” and “insight.” Here is a book. It is a dictionary. A man gave years of ceaseless labour to its creation. What is it? A Chinese dictionary. Who compiled it? A missionary. And this when he might have been teaching the multitude, feeding the hungry, carrying consolation to the terrified and depressed. To what purpose is this waste? Why were not these years invested and given the poor? So says “sight;” How does “insight” regard the labour! The dictionary is a door of hope, the carrier of light, the key to an empire, a living way into the thought and heart of a vast people.
4. There are two ways of looking at the fabric of this building in which we at present worship. “Sight” says, “How plain the structure, made of common brick! And the windows! nothing about them tasteful and refined.” “Insight” gazes at the building and recalls the men and women who have found their Saviour here. A panorama of spiritual ministers passes before it, the consecration of wedlock, the dedication of little children, the illumination of death, the transfiguration of sorrow, the heightening of joy! To the soul’s vision this plain brick house is an earthly vessel, precious because of the heavenly treasure of which it has been, and is, the shrine.
5. There are two ways of looking at the bread upon the Communion table. To “sight” it is common baker’s bread, bought at so much a loaf, and there is much more like it. To “vision” it is a token of a broken body and of shed blood. By vision we realise the spiritual significance of things, and by fixing our regard upon them we appropriate their contents into our own spirits. (J. H.Jowett, M. A.)
Religious, but without spiritual discernment
Now let me mention an astounding thing. This word of the prophet’s, and the stern warning as to the perils of blindness with which this book abounds, are addressed not to the men of the world, the jauntily irreligious, the men who treat the affairs of the Highest with levity or derision. They are addressed to the religious, to the regular churchgoers, to the recognised adherents of the synagogue and the temple. They are addressed to men and women who are religious but who have no vision, who pay scrupulous attention to ritual but who are devoid of spiritual discernment. They had given undue emphasis to the formal. Their life had been lived on the superficies. In the realm of religion they were geographers, not geologists; registrars, not poets. They lived and moved on the piano of rules, they did not enter into the roomy depths of principles. They were great at surface measurements; the measure of a Sabbath day’s journey, the length of a rope, the hang of a tassel, the fixing of a pin, the duration of a fast. Now when the formal is unduly emphasised it is at the expense of the moral. When ritual is obtrusive the spiritual is impaired. These exalted the trellis and forgot the fruit! But when the spiritual is minimised, life becomes callous. We become indurated by worship of form. What therefore do we find? We find that in the speech of the prophets it is the formally religious people who are denounced for their senselessness; the formal have become the brutal. They have lost their spiritual refinement, and with it their sympathy for their kind. And when the refinement has gone from the spirit, men lose their insight, their power of seeing the invisible. “They have eyes, but they see not.” (J. H.Jowett, M. A.)
Conditions of spiritual vision
How can we gain and keep the power of vision?
1. Let us seek our answer in the Book of Revelation: “Anoint thine eyes with eye salve that thou mayest see.” Mark the connection of this passage. The anointing follows an adorning; before the eyes are mentioned attention has been drawn to the garments. The garment must be changed; the raiment must be made “white.” The life must attain unto purity. Then, succeeding the purity, comes the vision--the insight. First, there is the “washing of regeneration”; then “the vision and faculty Divine.” “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” “Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things.”
2. And there is one other condition which must be named. It is suggested to us by a word of the Apostle Paul: “I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision.” When we have discerned a heavenly meaning, when we have seen the Divine significance of things, when we have entered into the spiritual purpose, we are to be true to what we have seen. I must bring my life into conformity with my light. “Hold fast that which thou hast.” I must not batter the gates of heaven for more light if I am rebellious to the light already given. I must be true to what I see. If I live truly I shall see truly. Obedience is the way to the larger vision. (J. H. Jowett, M. A.)
Israel’s detective insight
The great objects which were presented to the view of this people were, the astonishing wonders which were brought before their eyes, the many terrible judgments inflicted upon their enemies, the signal victories with which they were crowned, the glorious deliverances and remarkable interpositions of kind Providence in their behalf. (R. Macculloch.)
Responsibility of having the Gospel
A writer says, “You may buy a New Testament for a few pence, yet it may be to you at last the most costly possession you ever had.” (Sunday School Chronicle.)
Petrifaction
The petrifying well at Knaresborough well known, and may illustrate this subject. It is a cascade from the river Nidd, about fifteen feet high and twice as broad, and forms an aqueous curtain to a cave. The dripping waters are used for petrifying anything that may be hung up in the drip of the water ledge, which flows over, as it were, the eaves of the cave. This ledge of limestone rock is augmented unceasingly by the action of the water--which flows over it. In the cascade a great variety of objects are hung up by short lengths of wire, and these are petrified, turned into rock, by the water trickling over them; sponges, books, gloves, veils, animals, and birds subjected to the action of the shower are changed into stone. A sponge is petrified in a few months; some things require a year or two. Petrifying streams threaten our spiritual life, and unless duly resisted, steal away our vitality and leave us with the coldness and hardness of stone. (W. L.Watkinson.)
