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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Isaiah 59:4 - 59:4
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
None calleth for justice, i.e. none seek to redress these wrongs and violences; they commit all rapines and frauds under impunity; either,
1. Because the judges are corrupt. Or,
2. Because none will warn the judges of their duty. Or,
3. Because none seek to bring offenders to justice. Or,
4. Because none will plead a righteous cause, or plead it righteously, or countenance goodness; and this the next expression favours; and so justice suffers, which the Hebrew word mispat, being in the passive voice, seems to intimate: the sense is the same, and whereas it is said none, it is as much as to say very few, as we say few or none; the like Psa_14:3.
Quest. How could this be charged upon them, when in the time of their captivity they had no courts?
Answ. It is probable they had courts among themselves, to judge between one another, by leave of the Babylonish kings.
They trust in vanity; either,
1. Relating to their lies, which are words empty and void of all consistency; and so it is the same with the next expression,
and speak lies. Or,
2. In their idols, which are stocks and stones, and so oft called vanity and nothing, 1Co_8:4. For even in Babylon they worshipped idols, as appears by Jer_16:11,12,18. Or rather,
3. In their power, and craft, and policy, whereby, laying aside justice, they can oppress others; and so he calls it vanity by a metonymy of the adjunct, because it would prove all vain in the end, and either,
1. Frustrate their ends. Or,
2. Not justify them against God’s proceedings with them. Or,
3. Bring all into emptiness and confusion: the word is tohu, whereby the confusion and mingling of all things is expressed, before the world was brought into order and form, Gen_1:2.
Speak lies: it may refer both to the judges, and to the lawyers and false prophets, that tell them they shall not go into captivity; they speak that which they know to be false.
They conceive mischief, and bring forth iniquity: these two words of conceiving and bringing forth note their whole contrivance, and perfecting their wickedness; the former notes their plotting, the latter their execution of mischief; whatever is in the mind, only out of sight, warmed and formed there by cogitating and meditation, is called conception, which being ripe, and produced to view, is called a birth; intimating that the wicked sin not occasionally and accidentally, but premeditatingly and professedly; they grow big with it. The expression is allegorical, and in the two next verses compared to the cockatrice’ eggs for the wickedness of it, and to a spider’s web for the vanity of it.