I. Isaiah here reaches and rests upon the very foundations of the faith, trust, and hope of mankind the living God. Creation rests on His hand; man, the child of the higher creation, rests on His heart. What His power is to the material universe His moral nature and character are to the spiritual universe. This is the one ultimate answer of the Bible to all the questions which perplex and bewilder the intellect of man, the one solution of the mysteries which baffle his heart. "Have faith in God." Creation lives by faith unconsciously, and all her voices to our intelligent ear iterate and reiterate, " Have faith in God."
II. Have faith in God. What do we know of God that we should trust Him? what aspects does He present to us? We have two sources of knowledge what He has said to, and what He has done for, man. (1) There is something unspeakably sublime in the appeal in Isaiah 40:26. It is heaven's protest against man's despair. Nor is Isaiah the only sacred writer who utters it. There is something very strikingly parallel in Job. And in both cases God's appeal is to the grand and steadfast order of the vast universe, which He sustains and assures (read Job xxxviii.). God tells us, if words can tell, that all the hosts of heaven are attendant on the fortunes of mankind. They all live that God's deep purpose concerning man may be accomplished. (2) God declares here that we are not only involved inextricably in the fulfilment of His deepest and most cherished counsels, but that we are needed to satisfy the yearnings of His Father's heart.
III. We may apply these principles to the seasons of our experience when faith in the living God is the one thing which stands between us and the most blank despair. (1) The deep waters of personal affliction. (2) The weary search of the intellect for truth, the struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible, to know the inscrutable, to see the invisible, which is part, and not the least heavy part, of the discipline of a man and of mankind. (3) Dark crises of human history, when truth, virtue, and manhood seem perishing from the world.
J. Baldwin Brown, Aids to the Development of the Divine Life,No. 9.
References: Isaiah 40:27-29. E. L. Hull, Sermons,1st series, p. 81.Isaiah 40:27-31. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 136. Isaiah 40:28. Parker, Cavendish Pulpit,p. 269.