ADVENT THOUGHTS AND JOYS
Isaiah 25:9. And it shall be said in that day, &c.
Isaiah is here, as he is so often, the prophet not merely of future events, but of future states of mind and feeling; not merely of God’s dealings with His people, but of the way in which they would or should meet their God.
To what event does he refer!
1. First of all, to the deliverance of Hezekiah and his people from King Sennacherib [1054] That deliverance was recognised as God’s work. The recognition of God’s presence in the great turning-points of human history is in all ages natural to religious minds. He is with men and nations at all times, but in the great crises of history that presence is brought more vividly before the imagination. So was it when a great storm destroyed the Spanish Armada, and when the power of the first Napoleon was broken first at Leipsic and then at Waterloo. Devout minds felt that these were reappearances of God in human history, and they rejoiced in Him.
[1054] It was no ordinary day that saw the discomfiture of the Assyrian host before the walls of Jerusalem. We can scarcely understand the terror and dismay with which a religious Jew must have watched the growth of those mighty Oriental despotisms which, rising one after the other in the valley of the Euphrates and of the Tigris, aspired to nothing less than the conquest of the known world. The victory of a conqueror like Sennacherib meant the extinction of national life and of personal liberty in the conquered people; it meant often enough violent transportation from their homes, separation from their families, with all the degrading and penal accompaniments of complete subjugation. It meant this to the conquered pagan cities; for Jerusalem it meant this and more. The knowledge and worship of God maintained by institutions of God, by institutions of Divine appointment, maintained only in that little corner of the wide world, were linked on to the fortunes of the Jewish state, and in the victory of Sennacherib would be involved not merely political humiliation, but religious darkness. When, then, his armies advanced across the continent again and again, making of a city a heap, and of a fenced city a ruin, and at last appeared before Jerusalem, when the blast of the terrible men was as a storm against the wall, there was natural dismay in every religious and patriotic soul. It seemed as though a veil or covering, like that which was spread over the holy things in the Jewish ritual, was being spread more and more completely over all nations at each step of the Assyrian monarch’s advance, and in those hours of darkness all true-hearted men in Jerusalem waited for God. He had delivered them from the Egyptian slavery; He had given them the realm of David and Solomon. He who had done so much for them would not desert them now. In His own way He would rebuke this insolent enemy of His truth and His people, and this passionate longing for His intervention quickened the eye and welled the heart of Jerusalem when at last it came. The destruction of Sennacherib’s host was one of those supreme moments in the history of a people which can never be lived over again by posterity. The sense of deliverance was proportioned to the agony which had preceded it. To Isaiah and his contemporaries it seemed as though a canopy of thick darkness was lifted from the face of the world, as though the recollections of slaughter and of death were entirely swallowed up in the absorbing sense of deliverance, as though the tears of the city had been wiped away and the rebuke of God’s people was taken from earth, and therefore from the heart of Israel there burst forth a welcome proportioned to the anxious longing that had preceded it: “Lo, this is our God: we have waited for Him; He will save us.”—Liddon.
2. But beyond the immediate present, Isaiah sees, it may be indistinctly, into a distant future. The judgment of his time foreshadowed some universal judgment upon all the enemies of mankind, some deliverance final, universal, at the end of time. For that judgment and deliverance the Church, both on earth and in heaven, waits and prays (Psalms 74:10; Psalms 74:22-23; Revelation 6:9-10). To them the answer seems to be long delayed; but it will come (Revelation 6:12-17); and when at last it bursts upon the world, it will be welcomed by the servants of God as was the deliverance of Jerusalem from the Assyrian army.
3. But between the days of Hezekiah and the final judgment there is another event closer to the prophet’s thought—the appearance of the great Deliverer in the midst of human history. All that belongs to the nearer history of Judah melts away in the prophet’s vision into that greater future which belongs to the King Messiah. The Assyrians themselves are replaced in his thoughts by the greater enemies of humanity; the city of David and Mount Zion become the spiritual city of God, the mountain of the Lord of hosts, the Church of the Divine Redeemer. Here, as so often, the incarnation of the eternal Son of God, with its vast and incalculable consequences to the world of souls, is the keynote of Isaiah’s deepest thought, and in our text he epitomises the heart-song of Christendom, which ascends day by day to the throne of the Redeemer.
(1.) “Lo, this is our God.” Christ is not for us Christians merely or chiefly the preacher or herald of a religion of which another being, distinct from Himself, is its object. The Gospel creed does not run thus, “There is no God but God, and Christ is His prophet.” When He appears to the soul of man at the crisis of its penitence, or its conversion, the greeting which meets and befits Him is not, “Lo, this is a good man sent from God to teach some high and forgotten moral truths;” no, but “Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him; He will save us!” (H. E. I., 835–845).
(2.) So might the Jews, the children of the prophets, have sung; so did some of those who entered most deeply into the meaning of the promises given to their fathers (Luke 1:46-55; Luke 1:68-79; Luke 2:29-32).
(3.) So might the noble philosophers of Greece have sung; so they did sing when, in Christ the incarnate God, of whom they had dreamed and for whom they had sought, was revealed to them.
(4.) So have sung in all ages that multitude of human souls whom a profound sense of moral need has brought to the feet of the Redeemer (H. E. I., 948–971).—H. P. Liddon, M.A.: Christian World Pulpit, vol. xiii. pp. 1–3.
I. WHAT ARE THOSE COMINGS OF CHRIST WHICH ARE THE OCCASION OF JOY TO THE CHURCH?
1. His coming in the flesh, His incarnation. To this His people had looked forward; in it they rejoiced. Good cause had they for gladness, for He came to spread the gospel feast, to remove the clouds of ignorance and error, to destroy the reign of sin and death.
2. His coming in the Spirit, at the day of Pentecost; in the experience of the individual soul, in the hours of penitence, of temptation, of sorrow. His coming in the flesh was the great promise of the Old Testament; His coming in the Spirit is the great promise of the New.
3. His coming to receive the soul to glory. He comes unchanged. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.
4. His coming to bring the present dispensation to a close. It may be heralded by many alarming and distressing events, but it will be itself a cause for joy. To the wicked it will be a day of unmixed terror, but to the righteous of gladness; for it will bring them redemption from the power of every sin, from the assault of every enemy; every fetter will be broken, every cloud dispelled.
II. WHAT IS REQUISITE TO ENABLE US TO WELCOME THE APPROACH OF CHRIST?
1. A knowledge of Him as our God and Redeemer.
2. An experience of the benefits of His salvation.
3. Love for Him.
4. Submission to His will and zeal for His glory.—Samuel Thodey.
I. In the day of judgment nothing will inspire us with joy and confidence but a real interest in Jesus Christ. The ungodly now possess many sources of present enjoyment; but in that day they will have ceased for ever. One grand, all-important idea will then fill the mind: “The solemn day of account is come; how shall I abide it? How shall I endure the presence of the heart-searching Judge?” But whence can this assurance be obtained? Only from an interest in Jesus Christ. Those who do not possess it will then be filled with shame and terror; but, amid all its terrors, those who do possess it will be enabled to rejoice.
II. In that day none will be found to have a real interest in Christ, nor capable of rejoicing, but those who are now waiting for His coming. This is a characteristic of all genuine Christians (1 Thessalonians 1:10; Titus 2:13; 1 Corinthians 1:7; Luke 12:36). Hence, in our text, we find the saints representing their conduct towards the Lord in the days of their flesh by the same term: “We have waited for Him.” It may be useful, then, to point out some of the particulars implied in this general description of the Christian character. To “wait for Christ” implies—
1. A FIRM BELIEF IN HIS SECOND COMING, and of the infinitely momentous consequences which will follow that event. The true Christian walks “by faith, not by sight.” Unlike the profane (2 Peter 3:4), he lays it down in his mind as an infallible truth that “the day of the Lord will come.”
2. A CONSTANT ENDEAVOUR TO BE PREPARED FOR IT. How the wise virgins acted (Matthew 25:4).
3. A PATIENT CONTINUANCE IN WELL-DOING (Luke 12:35-46). Are you thus “waiting” for the second coming of your Lord?—Edward Cooper: Practical and Familiar Sermons, vol. iv. pp. 225–240.
The chapter from which these words are taken contains a noble description of the glory and the grace of God, of His glory in ruling irresistibly the nations of the earth, and in crushing the enemies of His Church, of His glory and grace in the salvation of mankind. It records by anticipation the triumphs of the Gospel, the downfall of the powers of darkness, the annihilation of death itself, the reign of perpetual peace and joy.
I. A recognition of the birth of the Messiah. It is a matter of historical certainty that the people of God did wait for the coming of the Saviour from the time of the very first promise given to the woman after the fall, to the period of our Lord’s appearance upon the earth, at which season there was a general expectation in all the neighbouring regions of the advent of some mighty personage who was to realise all the sublime descriptions of the ancient prophets. Anna the prophetess, Joseph of Arimithea, the aged Simeon and other devout men, were waiting for the “consolation of Israel.”
II. An assertion of His divinity. “This is our God,”—not merely a prophet, a priest, a king, chosen by Jehovah from among His people, and commissioned to give laws and statutes, as Moses was, or to assert Jehovah’s authority and punish idolatry, as Elijah was, or to denounce His wrath against an apostate people and at the same time to foreshadow a great deliverance to come, as Isaiah was himself, or Jeremiah, or any other of those holy men who spake in old times by the Holy Ghost; but this is OUR GOD, this is Emmanuel—God with us—God manifest in the flesh.
III. A declaration of His atoning Work. How vast that work He took on Himself to execute,—the reconciliation in His own person of sinful man to an offended God, the overthrow of the kingdom of Satan, and the abolition of death! No man could have performed it (Psalms 49:7). Could any of the angels, then, have taken in hand this enterprise? Beyond the power, above the conception of any being of limited goodness, knowledge, and power, it could only be accomplished by the Divine Son of God. It was God’s work, devised and executed by Omnipotence.
IV. A recognition of the second coming of Christ. We are admonished by the Church that there is a Second Coming of Christ, for which the Church is waiting, and for which we, with every member of the Church, ought to be looking with earnest and anxious expectation. Is our language, “How long, O Lord?” Our answer is, How long the final triumph of the Saviour may be deferred, how long a period may elapse before the world is ripe for judgment, is one of those secrets which God has reserved to Himself (Acts 1:7). The end of all things, if it be not, in the literal sense of the word, at hand, is every year and every day and every moment drawing nearer to each of us. We are all in silent but unceasing movement towards the judgment-hall of Christ. In this point of view, the moment of our death may be regarded as placing us at once before His awful tribunal, for the space between the two, as it affects our eternal destination, will be to us as nothing. When the judgment is set, the books opened, we shall suddenly stand before the Judge, precisely in that state of preparation in which we were found at the moment of our departure out of life. Those who have lived as children of God, as servants of Jesus Christ, under the solemn, yet not fearful, expectation of that day, will then be able to lift up their heads and raise the song of joyful recognition.
Application.—If ever there was a great practical truth, this is one. If we do not wait for the great day of the Lord in such a spirit of carefulness and circumspection as to refer to it all our actions, words, and thoughts, then it is perfectly certain that we shall be surprised at its coming and be taken utterly unprepared. It will come on us as a thief in the night, and we shall sink into everlasting perdition; not for the want of means and opportunities of being saved, but for want of common prudence and forethought in the most momentous of all concerns. What, then, is the conclusion? Live like men that are waiting for their Lord, that when He arrives, He may be welcomed. Accustom yourselves to His presence, in His sanctuary, at His table, in His word, in secret communings with Him in the temple of a purified heart. So when this solemn day shall have come the glad response may be, “Lo, this is our God, we have waited for Him; He will come and save us!”—C. J. Blomfield, D.D.