A STRANGE AND SAD ERRAND
Isaiah 6:9-10. And He said, Go, and tell this people, &c.
A sad and mysterious errand, the statement of which might well have quenched the enthusiasm inspired by his vision of the Divine glory. When he exclaimed, “Here am I, send me!” how little did he anticipate for what purpose he would be sent! It must have astounded and saddened him, and it is full of astonishment and mystery for us. How could God have sent His servant on an errand such as this?
Much of the mystery will be relieved, though not altogether removed, if we recognise—what I believe to be the fact—that here we have a statement, not of the messages Isaiah was to deliver (for they were many, and were revealed to him at various times), but of what would be the result of them all. Those to whom he was sent, and whom he desired to bless, would not be made better, but worse, by his ministry.
This is in accordance with a well-known and terrible fact, viz., that the proclamation of truth often leads men to cleave more desperately to error [757] Why, then, does God send His servants to proclaim it?
[757] To a man living in the belief of what is erroneous or the practice of what is wrong you proclaim the truth, and what happens? (1) Either he amends his creed or his conduct; or (2) he disregards what you say, and goes on as before; or (3) he rejects what you say, and cleaves to his error more passionately than he would have done otherwise. The latter is a very frequent result. For example, slavery once prevailed throughout our colonies and the United States of America. Holy men held slaves; they had no suspicion of the wrongfulness of slavery. When its wrongfulness was proclaimed, many abandoned it; but others held to it,—some not caring whether it was wrong or right, looking only to the fact that it was profitable; but others reasoned themselves into a persuasion that it is right, that it is Scriptural, and maintained the system with a tenacity and passion they never felt before its wickedness was declared. In thousands of cases that was the result of the anti-slavery movement. God foresaw it, yet He raised up faithful men to proclaim the doctrines of human brotherhood and freedom, and sent them forth on their perilous errand, saying to them in effect, “Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.” He sent them forth, notwithstanding that He foresaw that one inevitable effect of their mission would be the confirmation of thousands in error, the hardening of thousands in iniquity. In like manner He raised up Isaiah and other prophets to denounce the sensuality of the Jews, to pronounce their political schemes—their alliances now with Egypt and now with Assyria—to be huge mistakes, and to exhort them to a life of holiness and of simple trust in God; He foresaw that the result of their efforts would not be the reformation of the nation, and yet He sent them forth!
Not because He desires the depravity and destruction of men. Such a desire would be utterly inconsistent with His character and with His express declarations (Ezekiel 18:23; Ezekiel 18:32, &c.). We need not imagine, then, that we have here a confirmation of those schemes of arbitrary election and reprobation which some theologians have attributed to Him.
But
1. Because it is necessary for the preservation of His character as a God of righteousness and mercy that He should do what OUGHT to result in the salvation of men. Had He not sent His prophets forth on their sad mission, we should have been confronted by a greater difficulty: God permitting His chosen people to go on to ruin without one word of warning spoken, without one effort put forth to arrest them. But one of the supreme moral necessities of the universe is this, that His character as a God desiring the redemption of sinners should be maintained unimpaired; and therefore He sends forth His messengers to proclaim the truth, although He foresees that to many they will be the “savour of death unto death,”—as the frosty air of winter which cuts off the aged and feeble,—and not “the savour of life unto life,”—not as that same frosty air which “braces” and invigorates those who are already vigorous. As this quotation reminds you, this is the effect of the Gospel itself. Ought God, therefore, never to have sent its preachers forth?
2. That stubborn sinners may be left without excuse in the day of their doom. God will not merely take vengeance on the violators of His laws of righteousness; He will make it manifest that while in Him there is an awful severity, there is no vindictiveness; and He will so act that, even when that severity is most manifested, not only the onlookers, but even those who experience it shall be constrained to confess, “Just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of saints!” He will not leave it possible for them to say, “Hadst Thou warned us, we should not have sinned.” They shall be speechless (Matthew 22:12; Jeremiah 44:2-5).
3. That the righteous may be saved. Did He not send His prophets forth to instruct and warn, even the men in whose hearts are the germs of righteousness and holiness of life would follow the multitude to do evil: they hear, and turn, and live: and this is ample justification of the prophet’s mission. Those who perish would have perished without it; but without it those who are saved would have perished also. And in this respect Isaiah’s ministry was not in vain: while to the vast majority of the nation it was “the savour of death unto death,” it was to a few—“the holy seed” of whom also this chapter speaks to us—“the savour of life unto life.” They learned to trust, not in Assyria nor in Egypt, but in the Holy One of Israel, and therefore were “kept in perfect peace” amid all the convulsions and catastrophes of their time.
This passage seemed at the outset full of mystery; our tendency was to shun it as one that would not bear investigation, as one about which the least that could be said the better, as one which we could have wished had never been written. What do we see now? That here we have an illustration of the Psalmist’s saying, “Clouds and darkness are round about Him”—so to our purblind vision it seems, the brightness being so bright that it dazzles and blinds us; “but righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne.” What should we learn from this?
1. Never to fear to investigate anything in God’s Word. There is nothing here which its friends need wish to hide out of sight; it is all worthy of Him from whom it came (Psalms 19:9).
2. Never to distrust God because of anything in either His Word or His Providence. Things that might cause distrust we shall meet with; some of them we shall never explain here, where we can know only “in part;” yet let us keep fast hold of the glorious and gladdening truth, that “in Him is no darkness at all.” God is light; God is love.
THE REJECTION OF DIVINE TRUTH
Isaiah 6:9-10. And He said, Go, and tell this people, &c.
The divine message—a message of melting pathos and of startling warning, of beseeching entreaty and of terrible threatening—must be delivered to men. “Go, and tell this people” is a command that shatters excuses and imposes an imperative obligation. God’s speakers have no option—speak they must (Jonah 3:2). The effects of God’s communications correspond to the willingness or the wilfulness of men.
I. Divine truth elicits human disposition. In the spring season, the sun sits in judgment upon the trees of gardens and forests. Then the trees that have life have it more abundantly. Their latent powers and possibilities are developed and exhibited. The same sun-force smites the decaying trees and shrivels those having only goodliness without life. Is not the Sun of Righteousness “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart”? When on earth, He who is “the Truth” evoked the hidden feelings, purposes, and qualities of men; and His manifold message repeats the process to the end of time (John 9:39). The ministry of Isaiah was a revealing ministry: the character of men and the character of the nation by it were made manifest.
II. Divine truth repelled because of dislike. “Lest they see, hear, understand, be converted and healed.” A diseased eye winces under the scorching sunlight, as a disordered soul will flinch under the fierce light that streams upon it from above. The disquieted conscience repels the entrance of the truth, because of the revolutions in thought, disposition, purpose, character, and activity which its admission would necessitate. None are so blind, deaf, insensible as those who do not want to see, hear, or feel (John 3:19-20). Men dislike the purpose of God’s good but severe discipline: they want not to “be converted and healed,” and they recoil from the painful process [760]
[760] “There is light enough for those whose sincere desire is to see; and darkness enough for those of a contrary disposition. There is brightness enough to illuminate the elect; and enough of obscurity to humble them. There is obscurity enough to blind the reprobate; and brightness enough to condemn them and to leave them without excuse.”—Blaise Pascal.
III. Divine truth cannot be rejected without injury. Divine truth and grace will not be void of result, though the result may be most injurious (Romans 2:4-5). Consequences of lasting duration are involved in our action of opening or shutting the doors of the soul [763] Not to receive the “grace upon grace” of God is to put the spirit into an attitude of opposition: this attitude can easily become a confirmed habit; and the habit, in righteous retribution, may be ratified (Revelation 22:11). Antagonism to God’s revelation injures the soul’s highest life; its power of vision is dimmed or veiled; the understanding loses its alertness and fails to comprehend; the affections become gross and carnal. Inexorable is the spiritual law and appalling the spiritual doom (Ephesians 4:18). Isaiah unfolded God’s design of salvation; but the design was intercepted and frustrated by human perversity. Men “rejected the counsel of God against themselves,” and persistent resistance rendered them “past feeling.” “Take heed how ye hear.” “Hear, and your soul shall live” [766]Matthew Braithwaite.
[763] “The smallest particle of light falling on the sensitive plate produces a chemical change that can never be undone again; and the light of Christ’s love, once brought to the knowledge and presented for the acceptance of a soul, stamps on it an ineffaceable sign of its having been there. Once heard, it is hence forward a perpetual element in the whole condition, character, and destiny of the hearer. Every man that ever rejects Christ, does these things thereby—wounds his own conscience, hardens his own heart, and makes himself a worse man, just because he has had a glimpse of holiness, and has willingly, and almost consciously, “loved darkness rather than light.” Unbelief is its own judgment, its own condemnation: unbelief, as sin, is punished like other sins, by the perpetuation of deeper and darker forms of itself. Every time that you stifle a conviction, fight down a conviction, or din away a conviction, you have harmed your soul, made yourself a worse man, lowered the tone of your conscience, enfeebled your will, made your heart harder against love; you have drawn another horny scale over the eye that will prevent you seeing the light that is yonder. You have, as much as in you is, approximated to the other pole of the universe (if I may say that), to the dark and deadly antagonist of mercy, and goodness, and truth, and grace.”—Alexander Maclaren.
[766] “The great iniquity is, or then is the Gospel hid in a sinful sense, when men have it among them, or may have it, and will not hear it; or do hear it, and never understand it,—that is, never apply or set themselves to understand it; or receive no conviction from it; or receive no suitable impression on their hearts from it. Thus, all the while, is the Gospel hid to them by their own iniquity, that they do voluntarily make resisting efforts against it, as everything of sin must have somewhat of voluntarium in it. It supposeth that otherwise a brute agent might be as capable of sin as a rational one, and that cannot be. But here lies the iniquity, that men might understand and they will not; and there is a natural faculty that should turn them, even in their very hearts; but there is a sinful disinclination, and they will not turn. For it is the will that is not turned: “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.” And so, when the Gospel is hid, it is hid, not because men cannot see, but because they will not. They do (as it were) pretend the veil; stretch forth the veil before their eyes or bind it close over their own eyes, hoodwink themselves that they will not see. Being thus sinfully hidden, it comes also to be penalty hidden by a nemesis, hidden by a just vindicta. Ye will not understand, then ye shall not understand; ye will harden your hearts against light, against grace, against the design of the Gospel, and they shall be hardened. Since ye will have it so, so let it be.”—John Howe.
D. P. Q., 2938, 3391.
THE DURATION OF THE PROPHET’S MISSION
Isaiah 6:11-13. Then said I, Lord, how long? &c.
For an exposition of this passage see note [769]
[769] He inquired how long this service of hardening and this state of hardness were to continue,—a question forced from him by his sympathy with the nation to which he himself belonged (cf. Exodus 32:9-14), and one which was warranted by the certainty that God, who is ever true to His promises, could not cast off Israel as a people for ever. The answer follows in Isaiah 6:11–13: “Until towns are wasted without inhabitant, and houses are without man, and the ground shall be laid waste, a wilderness, and Jehovah shall put men far away, and there shall be many forsaken places within the land. And is there still a tenth therein, this also again is given up to destruction, like the terebinth and the oak, of which, when they are felled, only a root-stump remains: such a root-stump is the holy seed.” The hardening judgment would come to an end only when the land of Israel had been made utterly desolate. Up to the words “given up to destruction,” the announcement is a threatening one; but from this point to “remains” a consolatory prospect begins to dawn; and in the last three words this brighter prospect, like a distant streak of light, bounds the horizon of the gloomy prophecy. It shall happen as with the terebinth and the oak. These trees were selected as illustrations, not only because they were so near akin to evergreens, and produced a similar impression, or because there were so many associations connected with them in the olden times of Israel’s history; but also because they formed such fitting symbols of Israel, on account of their peculiar facility for springing up again from the root (like the beech and nut, for example), even when they had been completely felled.… The root-stump was the remnant that had survived the judgment, and this remnant would become a seed, out of which a new Israel would spring up after the old had been destroyed. Thus in a few words is the way sketched out which God would henceforth take with His people. The passage contains an outline of the history of Israel to the end of time. Israel as a nation was indestructible, by virtue of the promise of God; but the mass of the people were doomed to destruction through the judicial sentence of God, and only a remnant, which would be converted, would perpetuate the nationality of Israel, and inherit the glorious future. This law of a blessing sunk in the depths of the curse actually inflicted still prevails in the history of the Jews. The way of salvation is open to all. Individuals find it, and give us a presentiment of what might be and is to be; but the great mass are hopelessly lost, and only when they have been swept away will a holy seed, saved by the covenant-keeping God, grow up into a new and holy Israel, which, according to chap. Isaiah 27:6, will fill the earth with its fruits, or, as the Apostle expresses it in Romans 11:12, become “the riches of the Gentiles.”—Delitzsch.
Let us look steadily at the facts before us, and then, perchance, we may discern the lessons associated with them. Isaiah desires to know how long his strange and sad mission is to continue; and the answer is, until its utter failure to save his fellow-countrymen from their sins and their impending doom has been demonstrated, until nothing but the mere life-germ of the nation is left. Here really are three facts, full of instruction for us to-day. I. Isaiah’s mission and the calamities he desired to avert by it were to work together. There was thus a twofold appeal to the men of that generation; and at its close God might have repeated the challenge, “What could I have done more?” (chap. Isaiah 5:4). Both by offers of mercy and manifestations of righteous anger He sought to deliver them from the doom towards which they madly hastened. Thus God deals with the world to-day: His preachers of righteousness and His judgments because of unrighteousness work side by side; this fact is a conclusive proof that God is not willing that the sinner should die. This is true of nations, and it is true of individuals. II. Isaiah was to prosecute his mission to the end, notwithstanding the proofs that his efforts to deliver his fellow-countrymen were vain. This is always the duty of God’s messengers: they are to deliver their message, and reiterate it, whether men accept or reject it. Whether it is popular or unpopular is a thing of which they are not even to think! the one thing they have to consider and remember is, that it is true. III. In the midst of all the calamities of his time, Isaiah was sustained by the assurance that the nation he loved should not utterly perish. Nothing could hurt “the holy seed” that constituted its true life. The Church of to-day is full of imperfections; the forces of unbelief are marshalling themselves against her; it may be that she will again be tried by fierce persecutions: but the Lord’s true prophet can survey all these possible calamities with calmness; he knows that “the holy seed” which constitutes her true life cannot be injured by them.
Here, then, is instruction and encouragement for the Lord’s prophet to-day. He is to preach the preaching which God has bidden him, regardless of everything but the fact that God had sent it forth. He is not to modify his message, to make it more palatable to his hearers. He must not cease to deliver it, although he sees that his hearers are hardening themselves against it, and so are bringing upon themselves a heavier doom. Comfort he will need, but he must find it in the fact that there is a “holy seed” to whom his ministry will be a blessing, and in whose salvation, if he be faithful to the end, he shall share.
In this passage there are also some supplementary lessons of general interest.
1. We have here an illustration of the persistence and success of the divine purposes. God selected the descendants of Abraham as the instruments through whom He would bless the world (Exodus 19:5-6). Their history has been one long struggle against this purpose; but it has not been a frustration of it: their very waywardness and wickedness have afforded occasions for the manifestation of His character, and the consequent revelations both of His goodness and of His severity have been blessings to the world. In spite even of their rejection of His Son they are still His people, and He will at length make them a holy people (Romans 11:25-29).
2. God does not hesitate to use any means that will help to conform His chosen ones to His own ideal. It is a solemn thing to be chosen of God: that choice may involve possibilities from which flesh and blood shrinks [772] The way to avoid those possibilities is to find out what God’s purpose concerning us is, and endeavour to conform ourselves thereto: then we shall find His choice of us a well-spring of constant blessing.
3. God does not despise the merest germs of goodness. Insignificant, comparatively, as was “the holy seed” in Israel, He watched over it with ceaseless care. Comfort there is here for those who lament that there is in them so little of which God can approve. That little He will not despise (1 Kings 14:13; Isaiah 42:3); He sees what possibilities of excellence there are in His chosen ones [775] and those little germs of excellence He will nourish until they have developed into that which will satisfy even Himself.
[772] Homiletic Encyclopædia of Illustrations, 86–90, 99–115.
[775] As the eye of the cunning lapidary detects in the rugged pebble, just digged from the mine, the polished diadem that shall sparkle in the diadem of a king; or as the sculptor in the rough block of marble, newly hewn from the quarry, beholds the statue of perfect grace and beauty which is latent there, and waiting but the touch of his hand,—so He who sees all, and the end from the beginning, sees oftentimes greater wonders than these. He sees the saint in the sinner, the saint that shall be in the sinner that is; the wheat in the tare; the shepherd feeding the sheep in the wolf tearing the sheep; Paul in the preacher of the faith in Saul the persecutor of the faith; Israel a prince with God in Jacob the trickster and the supplanter; Matthew the Apostle in Levi the publican; a woman that should love much in a woman sinning much; and in some vine of the earth bringing forth wild grapes and grapes of gall a tree which shall yet bring forth good fruit, and wine to make glad the heart; so that when some, like those over-zealous servants in the parable, would have Him pluck it up, and to cast it without more ado into the wine-press of the wrath of Almighty God, He exclaims rather, “Destroy it not, for a blessing is in it,” and is well content to await the end.—Trench.
See also Homiletic Encyclopædia, &c., 2454 and 3056.